Free Philida by André Brink Page B

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,