Whites Read Free

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 redlaundry. 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.