Free Philida by André Brink

that live inside an old fountain that come from God-knows-where deep inside the earth. How can I get away from him? He won’t be chased away like a bad dog. He make sure I know about him the way he know about me. And if I die one day I’m sure he will go into the earth with me.
    Perhaps that is what Frans is trying to do with me now, to get me away from Zandvliet. He want to cut me loose from my shadow. But that I shall never allow him to do. That shadow can scare me, or threaten me, or make me blarry mad, but he is still mine. If I go away he will go with me. To heaven or to hell, just too bad. Your shadow, as Ouma Nella will say, is like your story, he go all the way with you, night or day, all the way to the grave.
    * * *
    Deep in me I know that all the stories playing and tumbling inside me tonight are just to help me forget what happen in Stellenbosch, and what we speak there. What Frans say. That thing he say that really make me know for the first time what he is and what I am. I am a slave. He is not. And that’s all. Nothing else matter, not ever. A slave. That is not because of the beatings or the work, it is not being hungry or cold when the snow lie white on the earth, or to feel myself dying in the heat of the summer sun when I cannot lie down in the shadow of the Baas’s longhouse, it isn’t the pain or the tiredness or having to lie down when Frans –
Baas
Frans – want to
naai
me. It isn’t any of this that make me a slave. No. Being a slave, like I was today in that white office in the Drostdy, with all the papers and the buzzing flies around me, mean always going back to the place
they
tell me to go back to. Not because I want to be there, but because they tell me to. I am never the one to decide where to go and when to go. It’s always
they
, it’s always somebody else. Never
I
.
    Willempie is finish drinking, but he is still lying with his small face against my breast, swallowing greedily. I am in no hurry to get up. Tonight I
want
to sleep right here on the mountainside, I can move on in the morning. Above me are the stickmen and the elephants and the elands, and Ouma Nella’s stories. This place isn’t mine, yet I belong here. Here I know: there is a silence of the night and a silence of the day, and they are both mine. I can hear them both when I am here. It is like my shadow and my stories. They stay with me all the way.
    Yes, I know this old Elephant Trail. It draw a line between the mountains, with the sky above. The sky that in the daytime is crossed by clouds and birds and at night by moon and stars and the hooting of an owl. I know this way so well, running past Zandvliet to the Franschhoek and then on, to the farm Radyn, people say. And from there across the plains to the far town of Worcester. And on this side of the mountains he follow the line of the cliffs above, cliffs where the LordGod never came past and people only rarely. Where the stars hang so low in the night sky that you can smell them. I know that smell. They smell clean, like new washing, or like soap, like blue soap. And a bit like nutmeg. And like bruised grass. All that is left in me is a kind of dull sadness, like an old wound that is beginning to heal.
    It is a strange feeling to be walking here among the high mountains, day or night. It feel all the time that there are live things around you, moving very close to you, but you never quite see them, they always stay just out of reach. It’s like tokoloshes keeping out of sight, but never far away, like mountain people, it’s like rocks turning into people and stalking you. But they don’t really scare you, it is also a good feeling to know they’re there, and that they move very quickly from one place to another when you’re not looking, like shadows of clouds or the wind. Out of the corner of your eye you can see them running or floating past, but the moment you stop to stare, they suddenly go very still, as if they never ever moved. Perhaps you think it is a