Whites

by Norman Rush

  Praise for NORMAN RUSH’S

  WHITES

  “A haunting glimpse of individuals in the grip of passions and history.”

  —Time

  “Whites … is a collection of six low-keyed yet forceful stories set in Botswana.… There is evidence in them of those who have gone before—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, William Boyd.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

  “Superbly written … Rush … uncovers with grace, good humor and intelligence the sinuous complexities of the white man’s experience of Africa.… It’s the book’s sense of well-timed voyeurism that pleases—the sense of looking into the lives of individuals at precisely those moments where they reveal the most about themselves and about the culture that shaped them.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Rush has a brilliant eye for landscape [and] is a master at plot.”

  —Nation

  “Whites shows Rush at his astringent best—but even more, it represents one of those rare confluences of a particular witness, a historical moment, and an exotic locale that have created such earlier one-and-for-all copyrighted milieus as Isherwood’s Berlin or Maugham’s South Sea Islands. Norman Rush’s Botswana is as keenly seen, as memorably imagined.”

  —Tom Disch

  “A profound and splendid collection of stories about modern Africa that demands to be read slowly and regarded weightily … It is impossible to name favorites here; they are all brilliant, angry, careful, serenely wise stories.”

  —John Calvin Batchelor

  Also by NORMAN RUSH

  Mating

  NORMAN RUSH

  WHITES

  Norman Rush was born and raised in the San Francisco area, and was graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife, Elsa, lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983.

  His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and the Best American Short Stories of 1971, 1984, and 1985. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. His first novel, Mating, was awarded the National Book Award for fiction.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1992

  Copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986 by Norman Rush

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a

  division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally

  published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1986.

  The following stories have been published previously, some of them in

  slightly different form: “Official Americans,” The New Yorker,

  Feb. 10, 1986; “Thieving,” Grand Street, Winter 1985; “Instruments of

  Seduction,” Paris Review, Autumn 1984; “Near Pala,” The New Yorker,

  May 7, 1984; “Bruns,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1983.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rush, Norman.

  Whites: stories / by Norman Rush. — 1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78937-2

  1. Botswana—Fiction. 2. Whites—Botswana—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3568.U727W47 1992]

  813′ .54—dc20 92-50099

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  v3.1

  For Elsa, beautiful and good,

  perfect friend, with gratitude

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bruns

  Near Pala

  Thieving

  Instruments of Seduction

  Official Americans

  Alone in Africa

  BRUNS

  Poor Bruns. They hated him so much it was baroque. But then so is Keteng baroque, everything about it.

  Probably the Boers were going to hate Bruns no matter what. Boers run Keteng. They’ve been up there for generations, since before the Protectorate. When independence came, it meant next to nothing to them. They ignored it. They’re all citizens of Botswana, but they are Boers underneath forever, really unregenerate. Also, in Keteng you’re very close to the border with South Africa. They still mostly use rands for money instead of pula. Boers slightly intrigue me. For a woman, I’m somewhat an elitist, and hierarchy always interests me. I admit these things. The Boers own everything in Keteng, including the chief. They wave him to the head of the queue for petrol, which he gets for free, naturally, just like the cane liquor they give him. They own the shops. Also they think they really know how to manage the Bakorwa, which actually they do. You have to realize that the Bakorwa have the reputation of being the most violent and petulant tribe in the country, which is about right. All the other tribes say so. And in fact the Boers do get along with them. In fact, the original whites in Keteng—that would be the Vissers, Du Toits, Pieterses … seven families altogether—were all rescued by the Bakorwa when their ox wagons broke down in the desert when they were trekking somewhere. They started out as bankrupts and now they own the place. It’s so feudal up there you cannot conceive. That is, it has been until now.

  I know a lot about Keteng. I got interested in Keteng out of boredom with my project. Actually, my project collapsed. My thesis adviser at Stanford talked me into my topic anyway, so it wasn’t all that unbearable when it flopped. At certain moments I can even get a certain vicious satisfaction out of it. Frankly, the problem is partly too many anthropologists in one small area. We are thick on the ground. And actually we hate each other. The problem is that people are contaminating one another’s research, so hatred is structural and I don’t need to apologize. At any rate, I was getting zero. I was supposed to be showing a relationship between diet and fertility among the Bakorwa up near Tswapong, in the hills. The theory was that fertility would show some seasonality because the diet in the deep bush was supposedly ninety per cent hunting-gathering, which would mean sharp seasonal changes in diet content. But the sad fact is you go into the middle of nowhere and people are eating Simba chips and cornflakes and drinking Castle lager. The problem is Americans, partly. Take the hartebeest domestication project, where they give away so much food and scraps and things that you have a kind of permanent beggar settlement outside the gate. And just to mention the other research people you have encumbering the ground—you have me, you have the anthropologists from the stupid Migration Study and the census, and you have people from some land-grant college someplace following baboons around. By the way, there were several baboon attacks on Bakorwa gathering firewood around Keteng, which they blame on the Americans for pestering the baboons. Or Imiricans, as the Boers would say. America gets the blame.

  The other thing is that Keteng is remote. It’s five hours from the rail line, over unspeakable roads, through broiling-hot empty thornveld. In one place there’s no road and you just creep over red granite swells for a kilometer, following a little line of rocks. So the Boers got used to doing what they wanted, black government or not. They still pay their farm labor in sugar and salt and permission to crawl underneath their cows and suck fresh milk. It is baroque. So I got interested in Keteng and started weekending. At my project site, camping was getting uncomfortable, I should mention, with strange figures hanging around my perimeter. Nobody did anything, but it makes you nervous. In Keteng I can always get a room from the sisters at the mission hospital and a bath instead of washing my armpits under my shirt because you never know who’s watching.

&nb
sp; The place I stay when I descend into Keteng is interesting and is one reason I keep going back. I can see everything from the room the sisters give me. The hospital is up on the side of a hill, and the sisters’ hostel is higher than that, on the very top. My room is right under the roof, the second story, where there’s a water tank and therefore a perpetual sound of water gurgling down through pipes, a sound you get famished for in a place so arid. Also, in tubs on the roof they have vines growing that drape down over the face of the building, so you have this green-curtain effect over your window. The sisters have a little tiny enclosed locked-up courtyard where they hang their underthings to dry, which is supposed to be secret and sacrosanct, which you can see into from my room. You can also see where Bruns stayed—a pathetic bare little shack near the hospital with gravel around the stoop and a camp stool so he could sit in the sun and watch his carrots wither. At the foot of the hill the one street in Keteng begins at the hospital gate and runs straight to the chief’s court at the other end of town. Downtown amounts to a dozen one-story buildings—shops—with big houses behind them. You can see the Bakorwa wards spreading away from the center of Keteng—log kraals, mud rondavels with thatch, mostly, although cement-block square houses with sheet-metal roofs held down by cobbles are infiltrating the scene. Sometimes I think anthropology should be considered a form of voyeurism rather than a science, with all the probing into reproductive life and so forth we do. I’m voyeuristic. I like to pull my bed up to the window and lie there naked, studying Keteng. Not that the street life is so exotic. Mostly it’s goats and cattle. I did once see a guy frying a piece of meat on a shovel. The nuns have really hard beds, which I happen to prefer.

  Poor Bruns. The first thing I ever heard about him was that there was somebody new in Keteng who was making people as nervous as poultry, as they put it. That’s an Afrikaans idiom. They meant Bruns. He was a volunteer from some Netherlands religious outfit and a conscientious objector like practically all the Dutch and German volunteers are. He was assigned to be the fleet mechanic at the mission hospital. He was a demon mechanic, it turned out, who could fix anything. Including the X-ray machine, for example, which was an old British Army World War I field unit, an antique everybody had given up on. Of course, what do the Boers care, because when they get even just a little cut it’s into the Cessna and over the border into the Republic to Potgietersrust or even Pretoria. But other people were ecstatic. Bruns was truly amazing. People found out. A few of the Bakorwa farmers have tractors or old trucks, and Bruns, being hyper-Christian, of course started fixing them up for free in his spare time. On Saturdays you’d see Bakorwa pushing these old wrecks, hordes of them pushing these three or four old wrecks toward Keteng for Bruns. So, number one, right away that made Bruns less than popular around Du Toit’s garage. Du Toit didn’t like it. It even got a little mean, with some of Bruns’s tools disappearing from his workroom at the hospital until he started really locking things up.

  The other thing that fed into making people nervous right away was Bruns physically. He was very beautiful, I don’t know how else to put it. He was very Aryan, with those pale-blue eyes that are apparently so de rigueur for male movie stars these days. He had a wonderful physique. At some point possibly he had been a physical culturist, or maybe it was just the effect of constant manual work and lifting. Also I can’t resist mentioning a funny thing about Boer men. Or, rather, let me back into it: there is a thing with black African men called the African Physiological Stance, which means essentially that men, when they stand around, don’t bother to hold their bellies in. It might seem like a funny cultural trait to borrow, but Boer men picked it up. It doesn’t look so bad with blacks because the men stay pretty skinny, usually. But in whites, especially in Boers, who run to fat anyway, it isn’t so enthralling. They wear their belts underneath their paunches, somewhat on the order of a sling. Now consider Bruns strictly as a specimen walking around with his nice flat belly, a real waist, and, face it, a very compact nice little behind, and also keep in mind that he’s Dutch, so in a remote way he’s the same stock as the Boer men there, and the contrast was not going to be lost on the women, who are another story. The women have nothing to do. Help is thick on the ground. They get up at noon. They consume bales of true-romance magazines from Britain and the Republic, so incredibly crude. They do makeup. And they can get very flirtatious in an incredibly heavy-handed way after a couple of brandies. Bruns was the opposite of flirtatious. I wonder what the women thought it meant. He was very scrupulous when he was talking to you—it was nice. He never seemed to be giving you ratings on your secondary sex characteristics when he was talking to you, unlike everybody else. He kept his eyes on your face. As a person with large breasts I’m sensitized on this. Boer men are not normal. They think they’re a godsend to any white woman who turns up in this wilderness. Their sex ideas are derived from their animals. I’ve heard they just unbanned Love Without Fear in South Africa this year, which says something. The book was published in 1941.

  On top of that, the Dutch-Boer interface is so freakish and tense anyway. The Dutch call Afrikaans “baby Dutch.” Boers are a humiliation to the Dutch, like they are their ids set free in the world or something similar. The Dutch Parliament keeps almost voting to get an oil boycott going against South Africa.

  Also it wasn’t helpful that Bruns was some kind of absolute vegetarian, which he combined with fasting. He was whatever is beyond lactovegetarian in strictness. You have never seen people consume meat on the scale of the Boers. As a friend of mine says, Boers and meat go together like piss and porcelain. Biltong, sausages, any kind of meat product, pieces of pure solid fat—they love meat. So there was another rub.

  Bruns was so naïve. He apparently had no idea he was coming to live in a shame culture. Among the Bakorwa, if you do something wrong and somebody catches you, they take you to the customary court and give you a certain number of strokes with a switch in public. They wet it first so it hurts more. This is far from being something whites thought up and imposed. It’s the way it is. The nearest regular magistrate is—where? Bobonong? Who knows? Bakorwa justice is based on beatings and the fear of beatings and shame, full stop. It’s premodern. But here comes Bruns wearing his crucifix and wondering what is going on. The problem was he had an unfortunate introduction to the culture. You could call wife beating among the Bakorwa pretty routine. I think he saw an admission to the hospital related to that. Also he himself was an ex-battered child, somebody said. I’m thinking of setting up a course for people who get sent here. I can give you an example of the kind of thing people should know about and not think twice about. The manager of the butchery in one of the towns caught two women shoplifting and he made them stand against the wall while he whipped them with an extension cord instead of calling the police. This shamed them and was probably effective and they didn’t lose time from work or their families. You need anthropologists to prepare people for the culture here. Bruns needed help. He needed information.

  Bruns belonged to some sect. It was something like the people in England who jump out and disrupt fox hunts. Or there was a similar group, also in England, of people who were interposing themselves between prizefighters, to stop prizefighting. Bruns was from some milieu like that. I think he felt like he’d wandered into something by Hieronymus Bosch which he was supposed to do something about.

  The fact is that the amount of fighting and beating there is in Bakorwa culture is fairly staggering to a person at first. Kids get beaten at school and at home, really hard sometimes. Wives naturally get beaten. Animals. Pets. Donkeys. And of course the whole traditional court process, the kgotla, is based on it. I think he was amazed. Every Wednesday at the kgotla the chief hears charges and your shirt comes off and you get two to twenty strokes, depending. Then there’s the universal recreational punching and shoving that goes on when the locals start drinking. So it’s not something you can afford to be sensitive about if you’re going to work here for any length of time.

&nbs
p; Bruns decided to do something. The first thing he tried was absurd and made everything worse.

  He started showing up at the kgotla when they were giving judgment and just stood there watching them give strokes. He was male, so he could get right up in the front row. I understand he never said anything, the idea being just to be a sorrowful witness. I guess he thought it would have some effect. But the Bakorwa didn’t get it and didn’t care. He was welcome.

  Maybe I’m just a relativist on corporal punishment. Our own wonderful culture is falling apart with crime, more than Keteng is, and you could take the position that substituting imprisonment for the various kinds of rough justice there used to be has only made things worse. Who knows if there was less crime when people just formed mobs in a cooperative spirit and rode people out of town on a rail or horsewhipped them, when that was the risk you were running rather than plea bargaining and courses in basket weaving or some other fatuous kind of so-called rehabilitation? I don’t.

  Bruns convinced himself that the seven families were to blame for all the violence—spiritually to blame at least. He was going to ask them to do something about it, take some kind of stand, and he was going to the center of power, Deon Du Toit.

  There’s some disagreement as to whether Bruns went once to Du Toit’s house or twice. Everybody agrees Du Toit wasn’t home and that Bruns went in and stayed, however many times he went, stayed talking with Marika, Du Toit’s slutty wife. The one time everybody agrees on was at night. Bruns started to turn away when the maid told him Du Toit wasn’t there. But then somehow Bruns was invited in. That’s established. Then subsequently there was one long afternoon encounter, supposedly.

  Bruns was going to blame the families for everything—for making money off liquor, which leads to violence, for doing nothing about violence to women and not even appearing in kgotla for women who worked for them when they were brutalized by their husbands or boyfriends, for corrupting the chief, who was an incompetent anyway, for doing nothing about conditions at the jail. I can generate this list out of my own knowledge of Bruns’s mind: everything on it is true. Finally there was something new he was incensed about. The drought had been bad and Du Toit had just started selling water for three pula a drum. You know a drought is bad when cattle come into town and bite the brass taps off cisterns. A wildebeest charged an old woman carrying melons and knocked her down so it could get the moisture in the melons.