Read Online Philida by André Brink - Free Book Online

walking, Grootbaas, I say. I know all about walking. The Elephant Trail and everywhere else where people walk. And I know the Grootbaas won’t like to walk in all those places, but we can walk together if we must.
    It is quiet for a very long time. I stand waiting for him to tell the men to get on with their job and give the bladdy
meid
what she deserves. But everything stay very quiet. Until I dare to look up to see for myself what is going on. And that is when the tall bony man say very softly through his teeth to his helpers: Just take the
meid
and let her go. Give her and her white child some food for the road and let them get out of my sight, otherwise I won’t be responsible for what happens here any more.
    It is a long way I got to walk home now, and it feel much longer this time than when I come here. I try to smooth out the wrinkles from the road by making up a story. It’s something Ouma Nella tell me that very first time we walk all the way from the Caab to Zandvliet. And every time I have to walk after that I tell myself my stories again, so now I know them by heart. Ouma Nella’s story and the ones I keep on making up. The stories everybody at Zandvliet and on the other farms know. About the fountain up in the mountains where the Water Snake with the shiny stone in his forehead live. Or about the girls that play around after dark and then get caught by the Nightwalkers and are changed into Water Women who come out and catch the boys making clay oxen on the banks and drown them in the deep water. These Water Women have scales on their bodies and when they feel like it they can shed their scales and start again, naked and new and smooth.
    But not all the stories are about Water Women. There is one about the long-haired girl in the highest fountain, the one they call the Eye, high up along the mountains near the Elephant Trail, the one with the hair green as slime, and if she get mad with you she braid you into the long ropes of slime and drag you down, down to the darkest depths of the earth. There is another, about the Old Hag with the one shiny eye on her big toe. Or about the Mantis that changes itself into an Ostrich and then the Ostrich into a Feather, and then the Feather into an Eland, and so everything change into something else all the time. Or Ouma Nella talk about the wind that keep on telling his own stories from faraway places, the wind that take our footprints with him when we die, so people think we are not dead, because we all stick to our feet.
    There is lots of other stories too, stories that hatch in my head while I walk along the road that never end. Nowadays, when I walk from Zandvliet to Stellenbosch, I start telling myself about a girl that get ill, and every step I give bring me closer to death and hell. But on the way back it turn into a story about a girl who come back from death and open her eyes and come to know her world again until she find herself back in her own place, a story that make me feel alive again.
    Along the road I name everything I come past, as well as the things that do not have names yet, and in this way I get to know everything, and my own name as well. I begin with: Flatstone – Kneebreak Bend – Dead Tree – New Tree – Steep Rock – Round Rock. Then there is Ouma’s Rock – Old Man’s Bend – Frans’s Pissing Place – Ounooi Janna’s Hole – Dead Gert’s Sitting Stone, and so on. I start knitting them together, joining one row to the next, then the panels. And once the jersey is finished the names also come together, until I can tell in advance what is coming next, what will be waiting round the next bend, where I will reach the underarm, everything. Until I know the place as if I made it with my own hands. I can say: I knit my story to the end. Or I can say: I walk all the way to the last stitches of my story. It’s all the same.
    I can also change the stiches along the way, of course. I can add new stitches, or I can knit the panel a bit wider. I