The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Spoilt brat.

  She looked up, at the quotation.

  Oh that’s passing the buck from adult responsibility for what you do. The toilet-training syndrome. I would never have tolerated a child of mine as spoiled.

  ‘Spoilt’. Over-indulged. Chocolate and toys. But there’s another meaning to the word; to spoil something is to damage it for good. Like that burn in your carpet.

  You know everything—you’ve read everything, do people commit crimes out of self-hatred? Is it true? Isn’t that another explanation people give? Why should he hate himself? What had he done to make him able to do what he did.

  He passed her another section of the paper and returned to the pages he had. To think—thinking—of things to which were given only a moment’s skimming attention, before: an intelligent person reads selectively, no real interest in following the sex adventures of pop stars or the lurid crimes that must have been performed by the deranged. But now—here was that woman who strapped her two small children into their safety seats in her car and got out and let it run off a wharf into the water, drowning them.

  Other people! Other people! These awful things happen to other people.

  It doesn’t matter whose thoughts these were, Harald’s or Claudia’s; they were in the evening air on the terrace, they were in the rooms of the townhouse like the clinging odour of cigarette smoke in curtains and upholstery.

  He was aware that he and she were thinking of these things in terms of happening to the perpetrator, not the victim: as if the motive, the will, came from without. But it came from within. ‘The man is what he wished to be, he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

  Claudia went alone to the prison. Harald was a delegate to a conference of bankers and insurance brokers called by the Minister of Economic Development; he could not continue to subordinate everything in his engagement book to the susurration in his mind: without the outward performance of normal occupations life could not be even materially sustained. Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, the stranger to whom he was coupled in the processes of the law, would cost six thousand rands a day for appearance in court, and half as much for time spent working on the case in his chambers.

  Claudia found herself considering what she should wear; as if, without Harald, there would be a concentration on her presence in which her clothes would reveal an attitude—to her son—her attitude. In winter she wore trousers, shirt and pullover under the white coat of her working day, in summer a cotton skirt and whatever went with it was in the shops each year, she liked to be in contemporary fashion while her profession was old as human history. The healer does not have to be dowdy; the ancients, like sangomas and shamans of the present, wore beads and feathers. If she went to the prison in her work clothes this would, in a sense, be fancy dress; she would not be consulting at her rooms that morning. If she put on the kind of outfit she wore when she attended some medical conference (as Harald wore a dark suit for his) or went to a restaurant with Harald at the invitation of one of his colleagues, it would seem undue respect granted to the authority of the grim place that held her son. If she wore the jeans of her weekend leisure (a euphemism, a doctor’s beeper could recall her to her patients at any time of day or night) this might look like a thoughtless reminder that out there, outside the walls and lookouts with armed guards, people were walking on grass under trees, the Strelitzias were perched in bloom over the townhouse terrace where his parents sat in summer, the man Petrus Ntuli was watering the bed of fern. She dressed, finally without awareness of it, to please him. To be the kind of mother he would want; neither expressive of the judgmental conventions of a parental generation nor attempting to project into his own, to reach him by trying to look young—she knew that she sometimes took unwise advantage of the fact that she did look younger than forty-seven to choose clothes that were meant for younger women. What she wore should confirm: whatever happens, whatever you do, you can always come to me.

  Duncan did not remark on Harald’s absence; it was as if he expected her. She was the one to bring up the circumstance of his father’s obligation to respond to an invitation from a government ministry. He sends his love. It was the line scribbled as an afterthought at the end of a letter, even if the supposed message had never been requested to be conveyed.

  He said he’d heard something about the conference, on the radio. This tenuous connection somehow bewildered her, as if what he was claiming was a faint voice from the earth being received by someone strapped in a space craft. She could not picture how someone would sit—no there would be no chair in a cell—lie on a mattress on the floor and listen to the living going on. Outside.

  She had not noticed, on previous prison visits, that Duncan raised and lowered his eyelids, slowly, while others—she and Harald—spoke to him. It was not blinking, exactly. It was a patient, distant, stoically fanning movement. He hears us out. She was observing him much more intently and clearly this time than she had done before. When Harald was there, she and Harald had between them sensors invisibly extended, like the raised hairs on certain creatures that pick up the impulses of others towards them, which distracted from perception of their son. Each was tense to what the other’s reactions to him were; there was static interference with the reception coming from the son.

  Harald was not there; after a number of visits, it was as Motsamai had said, the warder was no more than the presence of the scarred and scored wood of the table. On it, she was suddenly able to take both Duncan’s hands in hers. She had always admired his hands, so unlike her own with their prominent knuckles and leached skin of doctors and washerwomen; when he was a small child she would spread his fingers and his long thumbs and display them to Harald, look he’s got your hands (and laugh cockily) I made sure he didn’t get my own, didn’t I. She turned them palm-up, now, in that gesture, but he pulled them away and made fists on the table, throwing his head back.

  Claudia was appalled. That he should have thought the gesture was a reminder of what he had done with those hands. Here, to him, in this place, you could not explain to him, this was one of those female reminiscences, sentimental, indulgent, that adult progeny rightly find an unwelcome fetter and a bore. It was a moment to get up and run from a room. But this wasn’t that kind of room. Walk out, you can’t walk in again. Can’t come back until the next appointed visiting day. This is not home, where misunderstandings used to be explained away.

  The irreparable made her reckless.

  —You’ve told him you’re guilty. The lawyer. I can’t believe you.—

  —I know you can’t.—He moves his head from side to side, side to side, it’s measuring the four walls, he’s enclosing himself in the walls of the prisoners’ visiting room. She has never seen the cell where he is kept but he has its dimensions about him.

  —Do you want me to believe you.—

  —Sometimes I do. But I know it’s impossible. Other times I don’t think about it, because whether you’ll accept it or not—

  Something terrible happened. She cannot remind him of the letter he wrote so long ago, and the pledge she—his father?—they made.

  —Wouldn’t it be better if you tried to tell me something now instead of Harald and me hearing—things—when you have to answer in court—

  He continues to move his head like that, it’s unbearable to her.

  —so I could tell you now, I’m telling you now that it doesn’t matter what it was that happened, whatever you might have done, you can come to us.—

  He gazed at her with deep sorrow changing his face before her, the nose pinched by the grooves that cut into the cheeks on either side, down to the mouth. Better not claim me, my mother.

  He did not need to say it.

  Slowly, cautiously, she took one of his hands again.—Remember, while you’re shut up here. All the time.—

  He did not withdraw the hand.

  —You can imagine all the things we want to ask. Harald and I.—She avoided referring to ‘your father’; any reminder
of that identity with its authoritarian, judgmental connotations—Harald with his Our Father who art in heaven—could destroy the fragile contact.—Could I say something about the girl?—

  —Natalie.—He pronounced the name rather than prompted. As if to say, that’s what stands for her; what has it to do with what she is.

  —I didn’t have the impression your affair with her was particularly serious, I mean the few times I saw her with you. And I can tell you I didn’t take to her much. But you probably saw that. Mama being carefully nice when she was really disapproving. Of course.—The slackening of a slight smile, between them.—I thought the other one, the one before, was more your likely choice to live with. This one. I’d look at her when she wasn’t aware of it and I’d see she had the childlike manner of many promiscuous women. They’re the hunters—what would you call it, the predators who look like the hunted. I see a lot of them in my practice, black and white, they have that same manner. I’m not disapproving of her because of promiscuity, you know. My only objection would be on grounds of what it can do to the bodies I have to deal with. I’ve always supposed you’ve had plenty of experiences of your own. When Harald and I were young there were only diseases you could cure with a few injections. Now there’s the one I can’t cure with anything. At the clinic they bring me babies who’ve begun to die of it from the moment they’re born. But I thought—oh I suppose all middle-class people like Harald and me have that snobby notion—you’d mix with the kind of women who’d be as, well, fastidious as you. Fussy about partners. It wasn’t the promiscuity that put me off, it was the manner, the disguise, the childlike manner. My experience is that there’s something quite different underneath. And I must tell you something else. Harald met her at Motsamai’s chambers, and it showed. It certainly wasn’t childlike.—

  —What is it about her you want to know.—

  —Whatever you’ll tell me.—

  —Natalie had a child—not from me—given at once for adoption and then she tried unsuccessfully to get it back and she had a nervous breakdown. That’s when I met her. She recovered, she was full of—you know—the joys of life, return to life. She moved into the cottage with me. She has energy she can’t contain, she wouldn’t ever try to.—

  —You knew that?—

  —I suppose so. Knew it and didn’t know it. But if you ask about her you have to ask about me as well.—

  The warder stirred like a sleeping watchdog. Agitated, she lifted her hand away to look at her watch. Was there time, was there ever time, for this; years had gone by separating the two beings they were, blood counts for nothing.

  —You told him you’re guilty.—

  —Could you bring me more books. Ask Harald. You don’t have to wait for next week, you can deliver them to the Commissioner’s office.—

  But he embraced her, across the table, she took with her on her cheek the graze of what must have been several days’ beard; shut away there he was doing what she knew men did to change their picture of themselves, growing the hair on their faces. There would be no mirror in a prison, shards of glass are a weapon, but he could put up his hand and feel the image.

  Driving herself back to the townhouse she was tormented by what she had failed to ask him. The loss of an opportunity alone with him that might not come again; a connection that broke, but that had come briefly, irresistibly into being, no doubt about it. Did he—did he not—think of consequences? How could he not know he would be where he was?

  Perhaps he meant to kill himself, after what he had done. No-one had thought of that. He lay on his bed in the cottage and waited for them to come for him. Only resistance was to sleep, or appear to be asleep and not hear them when they hammered on the door. Didn’t he think about what would happen to him? To her. To Harald.

  Awaiting trial. Now there’s been a postponement.

  When Harald tells his secretary he will not be in that afternoon everyone in the company knows this must be the day of visiting hours at the prison. If his absence has to be remarked among his peers—apologies from absentees are read out in the routine formalities of a board meeting—there are solemn faces as if a moment’s silence is being respectfully observed; secretaries at their computers and clerks at their files exchange among themselves the country’s lingua franca of sympathy: Shame. The utterance has exactly the opposite of its dictionary meaning, nobody knows how this came about. And in this particular circumstance the reversal is curiously marked: no-one is casting opprobrium at Mr Lindgard for his son’s criminal act; what they are expressing is a mixture of pity and a whine against the injustice that such things should be allowed to happen to a nice high-up gentleman like him.

  Harald arid Claudia had close friends, before. Although these are eager to be of use, of support, they cannot be. Harald and Claudia know they have little in common with them now. There is her patient endurance of the telephone calls; without discussion, both avoid invitations, which are more than kindly meant: these few close friends, shocked and genuinely concerned by what has happened, feel left out of the responsibility of human vulnerability, the instinct to gather against it huddling together in some sort of mutually constructed shelter, the cellar of the other kind of war, from the bombshells of existence.

  The only person with whom they have something in common is Senior Counsel Motsamai; Hamilton. Without bothering to ask permission from them, he had established first-name terms. The fact that he himself was prepared to address Harald by first name was licence granted. He has the authority. Present within it, he has complete authority over everything in the enclosure of their situation. Motsamai, the stranger from the Other Side of the divided past. They are in his pink-palmed black hands.

  The Lindgards were not racist, if racist means having revulsion against skin of a different colour, believing or wanting to believe that anyone who is not your own colour or religion or nationality is intellectually and morally inferior. Claudia surely had her proof that flesh, blood and suffering are the same, under any skin. Harald surely had his proof in his faith that all humans are God’s creatures, in Christ’s image, none above the other. Yet neither had joined movements, protested, marched in open display, spoken out in defence of these convictions. They thought of themselves as simply not that kind of person; as if it were a matter of immutable determination, such as one’s blood group, and not failed courage. He did not risk his position in the corporate establishment. Claudia worked at clinics to staunch the wounds racism gashed; she did not risk her own skin by contact, outside the intimate professional one, with the black men and women she treated, neither by offering asylum when she had deduced they were activists on the run from the police, nor by acting as the kind of conduit between revolutionaries her to-and-fro in communities would have made possible. What these people called the struggle—she recognized its necessity, their courage, when she read reports of their actions, in the newspapers; kept away from them outside clinic and surgery hours. Stuck to her own struggle, with disease, and the damage other people caused: yet other people, who tear-gassed and set dogs upon blacks, evicted them from their homes to live in shacks from which old men and women were brought to her dying of pneumonia and children were brought to her dwarfed by malnutrition. She had kept clear of those others, too.

  Harald left her asleep on Sunday mornings and went to the cathedral to take Communion. It was down at the east end of the city where the business district ravelled out into blind-front clubs where drugs were peddled, and stale-smelling hotels rented rooms by the hour. In the congregation there was no-one who would recognize him with sympathetic smiles of greeting he would have to meet at the suburban church in the parish of the townhouse. He was alone with his God. It was none of Claudia’s business. It was nobody’s fault but his own that he had not seen, when they married, that she could never change, was ignorant, a congenital illiterate in this dimension of life where they might have been together now in unforeseen catastrophe. The nameless congregation was of all gradations of colour and feature. Paper
-white old ladies from pensioners’ rooms and adolescent girls with mussel-shell eyes and cheeks smoothly brown as acorns, thin black men lost in charity hand-me-downs, women in heavy-breasted church black, young men of the streets with Afro-heads like medieval representations of the sun. Phoebus framed in tangled aureoles of hair and beard. He took his turn behind a man the age of his son who breathed the odour of last night’s drinking and scratched at a felted scalp. He took the wine-moistened Host as did this man blessed in Creation with what not long ago had been an affliction, under the law’s malediction of a mixture of both skins, the suffering of black, and the apostasy of white.

  Harald’s religion surely protected him from the sin of discrimination. True, he had never done anything to challenge it in others; not until the law had changed society to make this safe and legal for him. All the years he was, as the convenient phrase goes in praise of private enterprise, ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, he had accepted without questioning that black people could not be granted housing bonds; they could not afford to meet payments. A bad risk. That was the fact. The government of the rime should house them: so he voted against that government, who did not do their duty. That was the extent of his responsibility. Now the new laws were addressing many of the factors that had made poverty black people’s condition as the colour of their skin had been their condition. He was one of those who did not initiate but could respond; he was prominent among members of the insurance and bond industry working with banks who were under a similar obligation to take the risk of putting a roof over the heads of people whose only collateral was need. It gave him some satisfaction to think that he was able to be constructive in improving the lives of his fellow men, even if he had failed to follow Christ’s teaching in destruction of the temples of their suffering. He served on a commission comprised of representatives of the new government and of the finance industry. The members were blacks and whites, of course; the bad risk was shared now. At least, if nothing else brought them together, they were on comfortable terms in business philosophy.