Whites

by Norman Rush

  We know what Du Toit did when he came back and found out Bruns had been there. First he punched the housemaid, Myriad Gofetile (her twin sister also works for Du Toit), for letting Bruns in or for not telling him about it, one or the other. And Marika wasn’t seen outside the house for a while, although the Boers usually try not to mark their women where it shows when they beat them.

  Those are two people I would love to see fighting, Deon and Marika Du Toit, tooth and nail. It would be gorgeous. Both of them are types. He’s fairly gigantic. Marika has skin like a store dummy’s. She’s proud of it. She’s one of those people who are between twenty-five and forty but you can’t tell where. She has high cheekbones you can’t help envying, and these long eyes, rather Eurasian-looking. She wears her hair like a fool, though—lacquered, like a scoop around her head. Her hair is yellowish. She hardly says anything. But she doesn’t need to because she’s so brilliant with her cigarette, smoking and posing.

  Deon was away hunting during the time or times Bruns visited. The inevitable thing happened, besides beating up on his household, when Deon found out. This was the day he got back, midmorning. He sent a yard boy to the hospital with a message to the effect that Bruns is ordered to drop whatever he’s doing and come immediately to see Deon at the house.

  Bruns is cool. He sends back the message that he’s engaged on work for the hospital and regrets he isn’t free to visit.

  So that message went back, and the yard boy comes back with a new command that Bruns should come to Du Toit’s at tea, which would be at about eleven. Bruns sends the message back that he doesn’t break for tea, which was true.

  Suddenly you have Deon himself materializing in the hospital garage, enraged, still covered with gore from hauling game out of his pickup. He had shot some eland.

  “You don’t come by my wife when I am away!” He ended up screaming this at Bruns, who just carried on fixing some vehicle.

  He now orders Bruns to come to his house at lunch, calling him a worm and so on, which was apropos Bruns being a pacifist.

  Bruns took the position that he had authority over who was present in the garage and ordered Du Toit to leave.

  Then there was a stupid exchange to the effect that Bruns would come only if Du Toit was in actual fact inviting him to a meal at noon.

  Throughout all this Bruns is projecting a more and more sorrowful calmness. Also, everything Bruns says is an aside, since he keeps steadily working. Deon gets frantic. The sun is pounding down. You have this silent chorus of Africans standing around. There is no question but that they are loving every moment.

  It ends with Deon telling Bruns he had better be at his house at noon if he expects to live to have sons.

  Of course, after the fact everybody wanted to know why somebody didn’t intervene.

  Bruns did go at lunchtime to Deon’s.

  The whole front of Deon’s place is a screened veranda he uses for making biltong. From the street it looks like red laundry. There are eight or nine clotheslines perpetually hung with rags of red meat turning purple, air-drying. This is where they met. Out in the road you had an audience of Bakorwa pretending to be going somewhere, slowly.

  Meat means flies. Here is where the absurd takes a hand. Deon comes onto the porch from the house. Bruns goes onto the porch from the yard. The confrontation is about to begin. Deon is just filling his lungs to launch out at Bruns when the absurd thing happens: he inhales a fly. Suddenly you have a farce going. The fly apparently got rather far up his nostril. Deon goes into a fit, stamping and snorting. He’s in a state of terror. You inhale a fly and the body takes over. Also you have to remember that there are certain flies that fly up the nostrils of wildebeests and lay eggs that turn into maggots that eat the brains of the animals, which makes them gallop in circles until they die of exhaustion. Deon has seen this, of course.

  The scene is over before it begins. Deon crashes back into his living room screaming for help. It is total public humiliation. The Bakorwa see Bruns walk away nonchalantly and hear Du Toit thrashing and yelling.

  Marika got the fly out with tweezers, I heard. By then Bruns was back at work.

  Here is my theory of the last act. Deon’s next move was inevitable—to arrange for a proxy to catch Bruns that same night and give him a beating. For symbolic and other reasons, it had to be one of the Bakorwa. At this point both Bruns and Deon are deep in the grip of the process of the Duel, capital D. Pragmatically, there would be no problem for Deon in getting one of the Bakorwa to do the job and probably even take the blame for it in the unlikely event he got caught. This is not to say there was no risk to Deon, because there was, some. But if you dare a Boer to do something, which is undoubtedly the way Deon perceived it, he is lost. An example is a man who was dared to kiss a rabid ox on the lips, at the abattoir in Cape Town. It was in the Rand Daily Mail. By the way, the point of kissing the ox on the lips is that it gives rabies its best chance of getting directly to your brain. So he did it. Not only that, he defaulted on the course of rabies injections the health department was frantically trying to get him to take. Here is your typical Boer folk hero. Add to that the Duel psychology, which is like a spell that spreads out and paralyzes people who might otherwise be expected to step in and put a stop to something so weird. Still, when someone you know personally like Bruns is found dead, it shocks you. I had cut this man’s hair.

  I’m positive two things happened the last night, although the official version is that only one did.

  The first is that Deon sent somebody, a local, to beat Bruns up. When night falls in Keteng it’s like being under a rock. There’s no street lighting. The stores are closed. The whites pull their curtains. Very few Bakorwa can afford candles or paraffin lamps. It can seem unreal, because the Bakorwa are used to getting out and about in the dark and you can hear conversations and deals going down and so on, all in complete blackness. They even have parties in the dark where you can hear bojalwa being poured and people singing and playing those one-string tin-can violins. There was no moon that night and it was cloudy.

  Bruns would often go out after dinner and sit on one of the big rocks up on the hill and do his own private vespers. He’d go out at sunset and sit there into the night thinking pure thoughts. He had a little missal he took with him, but what he could do with it in the dark except fondle it I have no idea.

  So I think Bruns went out, got waylaid and beaten up as a lesson, and went back to his hut. I think the point of it was mainly just to humiliate him and mark him up. Of course, because of his beliefs, he would feel compelled just to endure the beating. He might try to shield his head or kidneys, but he couldn’t fight back. He would not be in the slightest doubt that it was Bakorwa doing it and that they had been commissioned by Du Toit. So he comes back messed up, and what is he supposed to do?

  Even very nice people find it hard to resist paradox. For example, whenever somebody who knows anything about it tells the story of poor Bruns, they always begin with the end of the story, which is that he drowned, their little irony being that of course everybody knows Botswana is a desert and Keteng is a desert. So poor Bruns, his whole story and what he did is reduced to getting this cheap initial sensation out of other people.

  As I reconstruct the second thing that happened, it went like this: Bruns wandered back from his beating and possibly went into his place with the idea of cleaning himself up. His state of mind would have to be fairly terrible at this point. He has been abused by the very people he is trying to champion. At the same time, he knows Du Toit is responsible and that he can never prove it. And also he is in the grip of the need to retaliate. And he is a pacifist. He gets an idea and slips out again into the dark.

  They found Bruns the next morning, all beaten up, drowned, his head and shoulders submerged in the watering trough in Du Toit’s side yard. The police found Deon still in bed, in his clothes, hung over and incoherent. Marika was also still in bed, also under the weather, and she also was marked up and made a bad exhibit. They sa
y Deon was struck dumb when they took him outside to show him the body.

  Here’s what I see. Bruns goes to Deon’s, goes to the trough and plunges his head underwater and fills his lungs. I believe he could do it. It would be like he was beaten and pushed under. He was capable of this. He would see himself striking at the center of the web and convicting Du Toit for a thousand unrecorded crimes. It’s self-immolation. It’s nonviolent.

  Deon protested that he was innocent, but he made some serious mistakes. He got panicky. He tried to contend he was with one of the other families that night, but that story collapsed when somebody else got panicky. Also it led to some perjury charges against the Vissers. Then Deon changed his story, saying how he remembered hearing some noises during the night, going out to see what they were, seeing nothing, and going back in and to bed. This could be the truth, but by the time he said it nobody believed him.

  The ruin is absolute. It is a real Götterdämmerung. Deon is in jail, charged, and the least he can get is five years. He will have to eat out of a bucket. The chief is disgraced and they are discussing a regency. Bruns was under his protection, formally, and all the volunteer agencies are upset. In order to defend himself the chief is telling everything he can about how helpless he is in fact in Keteng, because the real power is with the seven families. He’s pouring out details, so there are going to be charges against the families on other grounds, mostly about bribery and taxes. Also, an election is coming, so the local Member of Parliament has a chance to be zealous about white citizens acting like they’re outside the law. Business licenses are getting suspended. Theunis Pieters is selling out. There’s a new police compound going up and more police coming in. They’re posting a magistrate.

  There is ruin. It’s perfect.

  NEAR PALA

  Here the road was a soft red trough. In a Land-Rover laboring along it were four whites, the men in front, the women in back. The landscape was desolate but neat: dry plains, the grass cropped short, small and scattered thorn trees, no deadfall anywhere, late-afternoon light the color of glue.

  The men had an acoustic advantage. In the front seat, especially when the Land-Rover was in first or second gear, they could, by leaning slightly forward, talk without being heard in the back. Or they could lean back and monitor or enter conversations proceeding behind them. They began discussing bonuses and leaned forward.

  The woman seated behind the driver was discussing her pregnancy, wearily. “Tess, we must leave it,” she said. “I’m so tired of my pregnancies as a topic. I’ll tell you about Greece. I adored it, and he”—she gestured toward the driver—“loathed it.” She waited for something.

  She said, “Gareth, did you not loathe Greece?”

  “What?” he asked, and then, before she could repeat her question, said, “Yes, Nan.”

  “There you have it. I adored it, he loathed it. For Gareth there is only one perfect spot: home—Sussex. So that all travel that is not Sussex is just willful. He hated things, Tess, that were so silly, like the Greeks hissing for taxis, which is simply their custom. And in Crete it was the hot-water schedule—an hour in the morning and another before supper, so we must always be poised to race back so as not to miss it. And the pillows were ‘sandbags.’ They were bad. There he had a point. I grant him that.”

  “We never go to Greece,” Tess said.

  “Well, you must. But what I truly think is, we should. I would rather not go with a man again, or at least not with Gareth, we are so ill-matched for that country. He agrees.” Again she listened toward the front. She went on, “I irritated him no end. Item: I thought it was clever to refer to tavernas, places you eat, as though the Greek letters should just be read right off as sort of English, so I called them ‘tabepnas.’ I had to stop. Not amusing after all. Well. But every time we would see two women traveling together—this was Crete—he would say, ‘Well, well, they must be on their way to Lesbos, where it all began.’ And I said nothing—not once. Then the fortresses, or ‘fortetsas.’ They are on headlands, very high, walled about, beautiful, overlooking the blue sea. There were sieges lasting generations. Cooped in, but they could look at the Aegean. So beautiful. But I was saying: On the top, there are date palms, old gardens still growing, graves, mosques. All these different conquerors left different artifacts, you see, and I just wanted to wander at will. But Gareth had it that straight off we must walk all round the perimeter to get a ‘sense,’ as he said, and only then could one wander at will. So it was. Placet. Drive gently, Gareth, we are tipping.”

  “I adore Cape Town,” Tess said. “Botswana is so dry.”

  “But Greece! We could organize it, Tess, and it is so much the reverse of life at the mine. I mean, the mine is all right. And Cape Town—All right, you go down there, I accept that it’s beautiful, but it’s far from one hundred per cent the reverse of the mine. I mean, everywhere in South Africa the whites are on compounds, too, but armed and that. One wants something totally unlike—not South Africa!”

  “Greece sounds lovely. Would you take the new baby?”

  “I forgot.”

  Gareth said sharply to the women that someone should please hand the water bottle forward to Tom. It was done.

  Nan said to Tess, “Truly, one comes to dislike the medical profession. Now I must deal with them again. Coming back here to Botswana from holiday, it was so strange and nice. We were in the plane, coming low over the land. I was happy to see Botswana again. It was so strange, Tess—the country seemed like a poor relation, someone nice who refuses gifts at first, someone you like. This country is so poor. We were flying low over it. And then all I could think of was our friend the peerless Dr. Hartogs, who said that from the air the country looks as if it has ringworm. He was saying that the brush fencing round the family rondavels and kraals looks like that. It spoiled it.”

  “We love the sea,” Tess said. “Give us four days and we make straight for Durban. Durban isn’t nice, but it has the sea to put your feet in.”

  “You’ll be singing a different tune about Hartogs when your day comes,” Gareth said over his shoulder.

  Tess said, “Nowadays whenever I am on paved road I never take it for granted. Even in U.K. I enjoy it, just the being on it. Even here, when you get to the paved roads, bad as they are, I just say thank God to myself. I hate these spoors. And why do they call these tire ruts spoors, does anyone know?”

  Tom said, “We put in the roads and they don’t maintain them, do they? They think a road is a thing like your fingernail—chip it and it grows back. Well, they’re wrong, aren’t they?”

  Gareth slowed. They were approaching a narrow concrete-slab bridge over a gully. There was no more than a yard of clearance on either side of the vehicle. The stream-bed beneath the slab was baked sand pocked with hoofmarks. They crossed safely. The bushes beside the road were plated with red dust.

  They passed a small settlement and the men began to laugh. An imposing thorn tree overhanging a shed at the roadside was clotted with paper refuse—streamers of toilet tissue caught in the spines.

  Nan said, “It’s unfair. We bring in all these metal and plastic things and bottles that don’t decay. In the old times, they could leave anything about and it was organic—it would decay or be eaten. Even as it is, the goats eat a lot of the plastic. Look at the courtyards, Tess. They are as neat as you like. They sweep them morning and evening.”

  “Yes, everything goes into the lane,” Gareth said.

  “They aren’t wasteful,” Nan said, in a voice made light. “Every bit of rag they can get they make something with. They make shifts out of maize sacks. They will ask you for your rags and they are so grateful—”

  “Hallo! Nan, don’t look on the right! Dead beast.” Gareth was peremptory.

  Nan did as she was told. The men looked. On the bank was the corpse of a heifer, fresh. Dogs or jackals had been at work. There was movement in the brush adjacent.

  “Third one this trip,” Tom said. “This drought is red hell.”

>   Gareth nodded. He related something that Hartogs, who was a great hunter, had told him. Animals were being driven mad with thirst and were fighting over carrion. There was some zoological protocol between vultures and jackals that was breaking down. The jackals were supposed to withdraw when the birds came, but lately they were staying and fighting. Hartogs had witnessed a magnificent fight. Gareth described it until Nan asked him to stop.

  Nan said to Tess, but projecting for the benefit of the front, “Truly, are we so superior as we think? I wonder a little. When we first moved in at the mine, we did something at the house so stupid I am still in pain. There were two pawpaw trees growing side by side by the house, one thriving with nice big pawpaws on it and the other sick-looking and leafless—dead-looking. Well, we thought it was plain what we should do: take down the dead tree. So we hauled and pushed on the trunk of the poor tree and strained and pulled it over—uprooted it, Gareth and myself. It was his idea: we must just straight off do this, get it over. Then, with the crash, the servants come out. They had funny looks on. Dineo said, so quietly, ‘Oh, Mma, you have killed the male.’ We didn’t understand. It seems the pawpaw grow in pairs, couples, male and female. The male tree looks like a phallus—no foliage to it, really. The female needs the male in order to bear. They take years to reach the height ours had. Then the female died. The staff had been eating pawpaws from our tree for years. It was a humiliation.”