The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  They are all three on their feet now, it’s as if again something for which there is no preparation is going to happen, the atmospheric pressure of that house where Duncan enters, the other man alone on that sofa drinking a Bloody Mary, is produced by them, overcomes them, as anxiety can produce an outbreak of sweat on the body. But it cannot be admitted; it has to be transformed into something understandable, that can be dealt with under control. The messenger is about to wheel his steed around and leave: that’s it. He cannot withstand, he has had enough of, their need.

  —Don’t go.—Claudia appeals, although he has made no move. So it’s accepted; all that was going to happen was that he was going to walk out on them. She opens her hands in a gesture towards where they were seated, and takes her place.

  In order to keep him with them they turn to discussion of practical matters. The possibility of yet another application for bail, once the case comes up for a first hearing; the conditions under which an awaiting-trial prisoner is kept. There is much, he and they know, they could continue to ask and he could tell about that house with the sofa, and the cottage, and the tracing of their son’s life there, but the young man is clearly in conflict between what is, they feel, an obligation to them, and a betrayal of the codes of friendship. The closest way they can come to this area is to ask whether lately Duncan seemed under any particular strain, say, at work (which is not a context of intimacy). Did it show, there? This was as far as Harald could go in approaching any long-term distraught state of mind that might have existed in the cottage.

  —Duncan’s a strong person.—

  That might satisfy Harald but Claudia jerked her head away from the two men.—You work with him in the same office, d’you mean it’s simply that he conceals his moods, his feelings? Even from you? He called you, talked to you on the phone, on Friday. —

  —If we feel like discussing something, we do; if one of us doesn’t want it, we don’t. We let it go.—

  —He’s always been a reserved person. It might have been better if he had talked before.—

  —Reserved, how can you say that, Harald—he’s always been affectionate and open—you didn’t expect him to discuss his love affairs with you?—

  They were talking of their son, Julian Verster’s friend, as if he were dead. To be in prison is to be dead to connection with consciousness outside, to exist there only in the past tense. Appalled silence interrupted them. Harald gave Claudia the look that in familiar signals between them, suggested they should give the young man a drink. She seemed uncomprehending, not to be approached. He fetched glasses and bottles, cans of soda and fruit juice, the usual habit of hospitality. The filled glasses gave them something to do with their hands; if they could not speak they could swallow.

  —I don’t remember ever seeing him drink whisky.—They followed her: to the bottle of whisky, the unused glass, and the bucket of ice beside that sofa.

  Before he left, it was safe to ask whether as a friend (close as he evidently is) Julian Verster can suggest anything in particular that they might take with them on the visit the next day.

  Nothing, of course. Nothing.

  Awake in the night, there is enactment of what might take place. Instead of the landscapes of dreams, darkness forms the prison, steel grilles, keys (maybe now there is electronically controlled security, like the green or red eyes that signal or bar right of entry or egress through bank doors). If they had never been in court before, it is certain that neither had ever been inside a prison. The structure comes from the narrowing perspective of corridors in scenes from television films, the eyes through Judas apertures, with a sound-track of heavy echoes, since of all the sough of ordinary life, the conversation of birds, humans, traffic, only shouts and the cymbal of boots striking concrete floors remain. The wearers of the boots don’t have to be dreamed; they already have been encountered in Court B17; young men with open-air faces who stand by in stolid inattention with the expression of contented preoccupation with their own private lives while crime and punishment are decreed. The cell—but prison visitors won’t see the cells, there will be a visitors’ room, the cells will be like whatever it is to which the prisoner went down under the well of the court: unknown. There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark.

  You can’t sleep, either.

  Beside her, he doesn’t answer. But she hears from his breathing—it does not have the familiar rhythm—that Harald is not asleep. In the dark, his attention is too concentrated to respond. That is all. He, too, has an inviolable privacy: he is praying. Harald is what is known as a great reader, which means a searcher after something that is ambitiously called the truth; both conditional concepts he would be the first, amusedly, to concede. He has tried, over years, through different formulations he has come upon, to explain prayer to her in a way that would be understandable to someone without religious faith, and the nearest he has come to this was to offer Simone Weil’s definition of prayer as a heightened form of intelligent concentration. When she questioned the proviso ‘intelligent’—what else could concentration be?—he satisfied her uncertainty by pointing out that there exists the possibility of a bug-eyed concentration on something trivial, which does not imply intelligence in the religious and philosophical sense. Prayer as a form of intelligent concentration is secularized in a way Claudia has had to accept. She has done this by separating the intelligent concentration from to whom or what it is addressed; then it is not a communication with a supposedly existing God, but a heightened means of communicating with one’s own resources in solution of guidance through fears, failures and sorrows.

  Harald is praying. His prayer enters the enactment of what will take place tomorrow. She lies in the dark beside him. What is he praying for? Is he praying that their son did not do what he is accused of? If Harald needs to pray for this, does that mean he believes what he cannot say, that his son killed a man?

  They got up earlier than they would do routinely on a working day. There was time to fill before the opening hours of admittance. They passed pages of the newspaper back and forth between them, reading the continuation of crises whose earlier episodes they had been watching when the messenger came. For him, the photograph of a child clinging to the body of its dead mother and the report of a night of mortar fire sending nameless people randomly to the shelter of broken walls and collapsing cellars was suddenly part of his own life no longer outside but within the parameters of disaster. The news was his news. For her, these events were removed, even farther than they had been by distance, further than they had been in relevance to her life, by the message that had interrupted them: private disaster means to drop out of the rest of the world.

  He went and hung about in the small garden allotted, walled and maintained, within the landscaping of the townhouse complex; the intricately paved path under the Strelitzias was covered in a few steps, back and forth. Nowhere to go. Where he stood, the angle of the sun struck into flame orange and blue wings of blooms perched like birds. She was in the kitchen, occupying herself with something. When it was time, she appeared with a plastic bowl covered with tinfoil which she placed on the floor of the passenger seat. While he drove she steadied the bowl between her sandalled feet.

  I suppose they’ll allow this.

  He rocked his head uncertainly. Awaiting trial, maybe.

  It’s just a salad and some cheese.

  Of course. Women, only women, have this sort of resource. They think of how to ameliorate. He was subliminally aware of tenderness and scorn, not for her so much as for them all, poor things; to be envious of.

  At that place, the prison, to which they were inescapably headed, they were received with the kind of courtesy that is learnt in public relations training of a new police force intended to obliterate the tradition of the racist and brutal authority of the past. Anyway, the officer in charge is an Afrikaner, himself a middle-aged man with all t
hat implies of adult children, parental burdens, family sentiments etc. he would assume in common with a white couple. Go ahead, he indicates the bowl of food.—But not to worry, he’s getting a good diet, everything. And you can take his washing and so on, nê.—

  Prison is a normal place. That is what they don’t know; the officer has a computer and several kinds of telephones, regular and cellular, in his bureau and there is a basket of flowering indoor plants with its bunch of plastic ribbons that has no doubt marked an anniversary or other celebration. The echoing corridors from the night’s darkness are there but these are ways they will not go down; they are led by the strong buttocks of a young black policeman to a nearby room. It is right that there is nothing to characterize that room; if there is, they don’t see it. It’s the space, closed off from all that is recognizable in life, where they sit on two chairs facing a table on the other side of which is their son. Duncan. It’s Duncan come from the echoing corridors, come from the cell, come from what he contemplates, in himself, there. His spread hands hit the table as they enter, as if striking chords on a piano and he’s smiling in a warning, there is to be no emotionalism. Signals fly like bats about the room. Don’t ask me. We only want to know what to do. I need to see you. If you don’t tell us. I don’t want to see you. Whatever: have to know. You can’t know. At least how did it. You don’t have to get mixed up. You can’t keep us out. Don’t ask for what you won’t be able to take. Come. I want to see you. Don’t come.

  Even here—this place that surely cannot exist for these three —there has to be a premise on which spoken communication can take place. The bats must be fought back to the dark from which they come, the cell, the wakeful night. There can be only one premise, one set by the parents: he did not do it. He is, in the vocabulary of the law, innocent, even though they are prepared to believe, they now must know, he is not innocent in the sense of the context of the awful event, the kind of milieu in which it could take place. For it to have come about implies that they have to rearrange life in that house and cottage of young friends as they had pictured it, rearrange the furniture of human relations there, Duncan among compatible friends, just a stretch of pleasant garden away, living with a girl in what might or might not become a permanent liaison.

  Duncan is not innocent, but he cannot be guilty. The crucial matter, then, is the lawyer; again there must be the best lawyer. That decision they are not prepared to leave to him, they will be adamant about this, mother and father.

  The lawyer, the good friend, they met in Court B17 has briefed a top Senior Counsel, someone, he says, in the class of Bizos and Chaskalson—Hamilton Motsamai.

  That is all their son says, he does not give reassurance; only the assurance that he will be defended by what they wanted, the most capable individual available. He does not tell them; he does not tell that he will be safe because he is not guilty of the death of the man on the sofa. This has become a delicate matter that cannot be brought up, as if it were some prying question into a son’s sex life. And indeed—about the girl, of course the subject of the girl can’t be mentioned, although surely she may be needed to give valuable evidence of some sort, she must know she was not worth killing for, that kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed. A gun in the mud. Someone else throws it there. A gardener thinks Duncan has dropped something, perhaps it was a cigarette butt discarded, and the police come upon a gun. What they bum to ask their son is: does he know why the man was killed? But that, too, is not possible, for different reasons: the warder, the policeman, is there as the three chairs and table are, but one must remember that the warder hears although his face is composed in the sulky distance of incomprehension: what the answer might be could be used in damaging evidence, the nature of some circle—how could they know—in which the son moves. Once grouped around an act of violence, anything and everything becomes suspicious.

  At least, as a doctor, she has something to say.

  —How much exercise are you getting? Do you manage to sleep all right?—

  Either to satisfy them or in defiance, he makes light of this concern.—Well, it’s not the five-star accommodation I’d recommend.—He laughs. This room is not used to laughter; it comes back at them from the walls as a cry.—There’s some sort of yard I walk around twice a day. Oh—about the dog. I suppose Khulu or someone is feeding him, but—

  —Because I can speak to the medical officer and prescribe a mild sleeping pill. And better exercise facilities.—

  —No. Don’t. It’s not necessary. What about the dog?—

  This is something for his father; these parents are appealing for tasks.

  —I’ll find a solution; I’ll fetch him. And books?—

  —Philip has brought me a few and I can buy newspapers. But you could get some of mine. From the cottage—and clothes.—

  —What about a key?—

  —Khulu.—

  Time must be nearly up, this produces a new height of awkwardness in the awareness of each of the three: the dread of his going back down the corridors of concrete and steel and their driving away to leave him abandoned there; and the shameful impatience to have the visit come to an end.

  The warder signals. The parents don’t know whether to linger or quickly leave; what the protocol is for this kind of parting, what makes it endurable. They embrace him and his father feels a hand press three times on his shoulder-blade. As their son is led away, there’s an aside, delaying for a moment the warder who accompanies him.—Don’t bring anything I was in the middle of reading.—

  What he must think of us!

  Think of us?

  Well, what did we say to him? So cold, matter-of-fact.

  He glanced aside from the road ahead and saw her hands in her lap, the thumbnail of one twisting beneath the short fingernails of the other.

  What could be said?

  The warder standing there. We’ll have to see if we can’t meet him alone with the lawyer, lawyers have privileges of consulting privately with the person they represent.

  That’s not it.

  The capsule in which they were contained moving between the irreconcilables, prison and life, was suddenly filled with their voices let loose. The fact is, we don’t know what it is we ought to be discussing.

  We don’t know what his entanglement is in this whole terrible—thing—he doesn’t give any sign. He says he’s going to have a first-class advocate but we don’t have any idea of what he’s going to give him; what line of defence the advocate’s going to be able to follow, what he’s going to prove, when he pleads.

  What about the advocate.

  They had heard it at once, in the shock of the name; the choice of a black man. She’s not one of those doctors who touch black skin indiscriminately along with white, in their work, but retain liberal prejudices against the intellectual capacities of blacks. Yet she is questioning, and he is; in the muck in which they are stewing now, where murder is done, old prejudices still writhe to the surface. Looking at the appointment of someone called Motsamai that way, he can find an answer within its context.

  Could be an advantage. If there’s one of the black judges on the bench.

  His voice is dry: that he should be thinking like this. Ashamed. And why should such a calculation come to mind—a black judge inclined to think better of an accused because he has chosen a black advocate—when we are not talking here of a criminal, a murderer, appearing before him. Where does such a thought come from, for God’s sake!

  But do you know anything about him? Maybe he’s just another good friend.

  We can make some enquiries. I’ll talk to someone at the top, I’ve met him a few times, he’ll understand although it’s not usual to expect one advocate to pass an opinion on another, I suppose.

  Damn what’s usual. I’m trying to think. What else should we be doing, Harald? Just sat there—chatting. Chat
ting. You might at least have assured him we’ll pay for the lawyers, anything. How do we know whether fees didn’t come into the choice? These senior counsel cost a fortune a day. If he thinks he’ll have to find the money himself, it might affect everything.

  He knows it’s not a question of money. He knows he can depend on us. Not the time or the place to make some kind of magnanimous announcement.

  I just thought you’d say … his father … oh all right, not about money, something—

  All you could think of was to prescribe a sleeping pill.

  I know. Well at least it was some sort of message that if he wasn’t being well treated I’d have pull with whoever the medical officer is. But something—