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.
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.