Philida Read Online Free

to Langkat’s babies, because Langkat is my cat, the Ounooi say so herself the day I knitted her the red-and-blue cardigan, the pretty one with the double moss-stitching, so she say I can keep Langkat for myself, and so the kittens is also mine. But then Frans say she told him to drown the litter in the Dwars River and all he can do is follow orders. I go and stand before him and ask him if he always do what his ma say. He just pull a face and say, What else? I ask him again must he always do what his ma tell him, can’t he just say no? Frans say, She is my ma. I tell him those kittens also want to live, don’t they? He ask me, How can I say No to her? If I don’t listen to her she will tell my pa.
    I ask him: Are you a slave then who must do everything she say?
    Her word is her word, he say and he pick up the basket. I can hear the little sounds they making inside and I grab the basket too.
    He say: Give me the basket, and he try to pull it from my hands.
    I grab it back and we pull it this way and that way. The basket fall. Inside, the kittens are screaming and mewing in thin little voices like needles in our ears, and the lid begin to slip off. Frans dive closer to grab the basket and push back the little ones, but one of them, the smallest one, the little grey-striped one, she jump out. I pick her up and put her in the pocket of my apron and hold her tight.
    Philida! he say, and his voice sound like crying. Give it back! I’m going to get into bad trouble.
    Then it’s
your
problem, I say. I’m keeping this one. I’ll make sure the Ounooi won’t get her.
    Philida, you a shit. Give it back!
    You a shit too!
    I’m going to tell my ma!
    This time I say: Let me be, dammit! And I promise him: Look, I won’t tell anybody. Nobody will ever find out.
    When Frans see he won’t catch me, he stop.
    You promise before the LordGod you won’t tell anybody?
    I promise before the LordGod.
    Then it’s all right, he say, you can have the little one.
    Before he can change his mind, I run off and rush to Ouma Nella’s room where I cannot hear the other kittens outside mewing and crying for help when he drown them.
    For a whole day I stay just there looking after the striped kitten and Ouma Nella give it some milk to suck from her finger and then all is peace on earth again, as the Ounooi always say.
    It’s only four or five days after that, as I sit outside our room with the little one on my lap, that Frans come back to me. He is standing out of the way.
    You still angry with me? he ask.
    It’s not you I’m angry with, I tell him. It’s the big people. Thank you for helping me to keep the kitten.
    He say: You better make sure nobody ever find out about her.
    From that day Kleinkat is our secret. And oftentimes Frans come to play with us if I don’t have knitting to do or if I can slip away when we sure that Ounooi Janna won’t see us. And from playing with the kitten he and I also start playing together. Like we played when he was very small and I look after him and change his nappies and get him to be quiet, the way Ouma Nella showed me. Those games go on until Frans is no longer a baby. And it’s always the two of us together, with Kleinkat, but often without Kleinkat too, in the deep shade of the bamboo copse.
    It’s only after the day they hang the skinny man in the Caab that I know everything is now different, and for ever. Because from that day, whenever Frans come to sit with me and we go off on our own, behind the longhouse, or to the deep well in the backyard, or of course to the bamboo copse, it happen over and over that, when I think of that day, I
sommer
begin to cry. I was never a cry-baby-tit, not even when the Ounooi took the strap to me, over my dress or on my legs or on my bare bum; I clench my teeth and swear to the LordGod I won’t cry, I won’t cry, even if they beat me dead. But those days I find that the tears come by themselves, just like that. Every time I see that thin man hanging by his neck,