Whites Read Free Page B

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 say 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 himselfstriking 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 notto 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