The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  It is very different with Motsamai. Hamilton. Servants used to be known to their employers only by first names, everyone knows now it was intrinsically derogatory. This use of a black man’s first name is a sign not of equality, that’s not enough—it’s a sign of his acceptance of you, white man, of his allowing you unintimidated access to his power. In this relationship the comfortable terms, quite accustomed now, of taken-for-granted equality once the appropriate vocabulary and the same references are understood, draws back from an apparition that must have been waiting in the past. In those hands, now. Hamilton. All that exists, in the silences between Harald and Claudia, is the fact of the life of their son. Every other circumstance of existence is mechanical (except for Harald’s prayers; the sceptic resentment Claudia feels when she senses he’s praying). Because of the old conditioning, phantom coming up from somewhere again, there is awareness that the position that was entrenched from the earliest days of their being is reversed: one of those kept-apart strangers from the Other Side has come across and they are dependent on him. The black man will act, speak for them. They have become those who cannot speak, act, for themselves.

  The relationship between the lawyer and his clients is not a business relationship of any kind Harald has known although the best available Senior Counsel is highly paid for his services. Claudia should understand it better; it must be more like that of patient and doctor when disablement threatens. But she was dismayed by the lawyer’s suggestion that she and Harald come to his house—for a quiet talk, Harald told her he had said.

  What Hamilton had said to him was confidential.—I don’t think Dr Lindgard—Claudia—and I have really hit it off together, yet. I don’t feel she has confidence—you know—in what we lawyers are doing. Ah-hêh. Yes. I want her to get to know me not here, this room reminds her of what is happening to Duncan, this place with the nasty smell of a court about it—isn’t that so? Nê? I want to talk to her in a relaxed way, get her to tell me the kind of thing women know about their kids that we don’t, my friend … I see it with my own youngsters. They’ll run to their mother. We men bring our work home with us in our heads even if we don’t bring it in our briefcases, we don’t seem so sympathetic, you follow. Any childhood traumas are useful to me in this kind of defence where there isn’t the object of proving innocence of a crime—no option for that—but of proving why the defendant was pushed beyond endurance. Yes. To an act contrary to his nature. Ah-hêh. Anything. Anything the mother remembers that would support, say, a deeply affectionate, loyal nature in the defendant. Anything that will show the extent of the damage done to him by the woman Natalie. How she betrayed these attributes he has and wilfully destroyed the natural controls of his behaviour—think of that scene on the sofa! Not even to go into a bedroom, man! She knew anyone could walk in and see what she was up to there, she knew—I believe it—he might come back to look for her, and what he’d find!—

  A brief preview offered of what eloquence Motsamai was going to produce for his clients, in court.

  Harald had to grant it as such with a gesture.

  —Claudia spent as much or as little time with him as I did. A doctor also brings preoccupations home and doesn’t even have regular hours. And he was in boarding school … if you think of it, how much time did we have of him. I don’t think she knows anything about Duncan I don’t.—

  —Ithink I know better. Sorry! I’m working on Natalie, I’m satisfied with that, and what I am looking for from Duncan’s mother is the other side of the story, what the young man was before that particular young woman got hold of him.—

  Harald has learnt that when Motsamai has something to tell that is likely to rouse emotion and dismay he uses the tactic of sudden rapid development of the subject so that there is no warning pause in which apprehension speculates on what might be to come. He does this now without a change of tone or voice level. —I’ve made an application for Duncan to go for psychiatric observation. To tell you the truth, that’s why I didn’t quibble over postponement. Among other reasons … I need time, I need a full psychological report for my submissions. Absolutely essential. I need to know everything there is to know about Duncan. As I’ve told you—from you, from Claudia. And I need to know what neither of you knows and what I’ll never get from him myself. There’ll be a State psychiatrist and one we’ll appoint privately, ourselves. I’ve engaged a first-class chap, your wife will have heard of him. Duncan will go to Sterkfontein—that’s a state mental institution, yes. Ah-hêh. Don’t be alarmed. I know you won’t like the idea. He’ll be there a few weeks—well, four weeks. And it’s better if you don’t visit. Don’t be upset. It’s a routine procedure in a case like this. Your son’s not mad, man! That is certainly not my submission, no! Something different—what propelled the accused to act as he did.—

  Duncan Duncan. Again the branding iron descends.—He’s guilty. In his right mind.—

  —No no Harald, the plea is ‘not guilty’. That’s the form. While we admit material facts which prove guilt, we submit our argument of momentary loss of capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.—

  Your son is not mad.

  —Only a few weeks there. And it so happens—it’s advantageous, point of view of timing. The trial. Yes … Ah-hêh. I have my sources.—

  The glassy whites of his eyes signal a quick nudging smile, for himself, not directed to the man in trouble.—It’s good to find out what judges will be on the bench during what period. There’s an old precept we lawyers have—well, call it a saying—you must meet the judge in the moral climate he occupies. I want the judge whose moral climate is one I can count on meeting in this exceptional case.—

  Your son’s not mad, he said. She, Claudia, understands better. I expected it, she says.

  What kind of place is it.

  Pretty unpleasant, she says.

  That’s all, from her.

  At the remove of the telephone, Harald told the Senior Counsel . that Claudia was stressed and wanted to rest over the weekend. Motsamai sounded as if he took no offence, but asked Harald to come to his chambers whenever convenient that afternoon.

  For Harald’s part, it still was necessary to show no offence was intended—after all, the man had offered his hospitality, if with professional motive.

  —Claudia’s become unapproachable.—

  But Motsamai understood Harald did not know what he was saying, did not know his was an angry plea for help, not a warning to the lawyer that he would have no success with the wife. Motsamai is accustomed to the erratic attitudes of clients—people in trouble—alternating between confidence and distrust, dependency and resentment.

  —The very one who’s in the same boat with you isn’t always the one you can talk to. I don’t know why. But there it is, I see it often. Don’t worry that she won’t get through to you. Don’t be disturbed, Harald.—

  Ah-hêh, In the silence there is the resonance of his soothing half-sigh; sometimes it is like a human purr, sometimes a groan you cannot express for yourself.

  And Harald at once felt a new anger; at himself, for having revealed himself. Too late to recall the image that should have remained private between him and his wife, to rebuff the recognition expressed (urbanity speaking clumsily for once) by this third party for whom nothing must be private because it might be useful. There is no privacy for anyone, in what has happened, is happening. Soon the prisoner’s utter privacy of isolation will be broken into by doctors. Night-notes at the bedside are discovered by prying eyes.

  —I’ll have a good chat with her anyway. I’ll make a date when you and I are sure you’ll be busy somewhere. Maybe I should drop in at her surgery, end of her day.—

  —I wish you luck.—

  He did not know it was the day the Senior Counsel had arranged to visit her. There was no regular hour for her return in the evenings, emergency calls on the beeper could delay her any time; she came in now lugging a supermarket bag from whose top the spiky headdress of a pineapple stood up. He half
-rose to unburden her but she was already passing into the kitchen.

  He poured her a gin-and-tonic, relic of those evenings when they used to enjoy sitting oh their terrace, watching the colours of mixed vapour and pollution wash out in the sky and listening to the raucous plaint of shot-silk plumaged ibises perched tottering on the treetops of the landscaped enclave.

  D’you want it in there?

  She came back into the room with the pineapple in her hand and signalled with a tilt of her head for him to put down the glass on a table. She was preoccupied rather than ignoring him; hesitated, placed the pineapple in space pushed aside for it in a bowl of apples, then took it out again and went slowly back to the kitchen.

  One of the displaced apples fell and rolled to the floor; it stopped at his feet.

  What was Claudia going to do with the bloody pineapple? Decide they mustn’t eat it? Everything they ate, drank, everything they did, the air they breathed, he was deprived of, they took while he did without, they took from him because they indulged themselves with these things while he, their son, Duncan, was about to be shut up among schizophrenics and paranoids. She’ll get Motsamai to deliver it to that other kind of prison, maybe they’ll allow him to have it. Maybe they’ll examine it to see if there’s a knife suitable for suicide or a file suitable for escape buried in its flesh; these cheap detective yam tricks of tension are a fact, for us. If it isn’t a pineapple it’s a salad to be wrapped in plastic, a bunch of grapes, a goat cheese—does she know how irritating these futile attempts to take our kind of life into his are?

  May God grant patience with her. Tonight while she lies beside him in her ignorance.

  Did you ask Motsamai to come and see me?

  Claudia has come back and picked up her drink. She rattles the ice in the glass and her gaze wanders the room.

  Why should I? No.

  About Duncan.

  It was his idea, he wanted it. I couldn’t say no on your behalf, could I? It was for you to say whether you’d see him or not. I simply told him you didn’t feel like coming to his house at the weekend, I said something polite and plausible.

  Why me? What’s the difference between that, and talking to us together?

  But he’s talked to me alone, too, hasn’t he? Times when you didn’t turn up. And you didn’t mention you’d agreed to have him come to the surgery today—I don’t know why you didn’t, some reason of your own.

  She is gazing at Harald with great concentration as if waiting for some move in him to be detected.

  I don’t understand you, Claudia.

  He wants to know everything, Duncan’s childhood, his adolescence, everything—from me. As if I produced him by parthenogenesis. Only me.

  That’s nonsense. That’s not so. You know the reason he has to question us both, everything we remember, everything we know —our own son, who else could know it! So that he can show what awful pressures ended up in him doing what he did. Against his nature, his background. What our son says he did. But Motsamai does have some sort of patronizing attitude towards women, so you …

  I didn’t find him patronizing.

  Then what is it?

  As a little boy, was he happy at school, at home, was he ever aggressive, did he confide in me. Of course he was happy! What else could he be, loved as he was. The question could only be asked by someone whose kids get beaten.

  She is searching among her own words. He tries to find the right ones for her.

  He has the idea that women, somewhere in the background, are more accessible than men, children turn to the mother—it obviously comes from the way things are in his own house. I’ll bet he’s an authority to be reckoned with, there. It’s their style.

  She has come upon something.

  Did the child have a religious upbringing. Did he go to church.

  Harald smiled. So what did you say.

  That you were Catholic and took him with you but so far as I know he stopped when he was old enough to decide for himself. I didn’t try to influence him one way or the other.

  Well, that’s something we won’t go into now.

  And does he believe in good and evil. Does he believe in God.

  Does he?

  You know that kind of question wouldn’t come up between Duncan and me.

  Harald raises his hands stiffly and places the tent of palms from nostrils down lips to chin; his regular breath is warm un the tips of his fingers.

  Neither knows whether the man, Duncan, believes in a supreme being by whom he will be judged, finally, above the judgment of the court.

  The barrier of hands is discarded.

  Perhaps Motsamai’s playing us off one against the other. Has to. So what the one (Harald swiftly censored himself from saying ‘who doesn’t want to remember’)—what the one doesn’t remember he may get from the other. That’s all.

  The townhouse is a court, a place where there are only accusers and accused. She leans back in her chair, arms spread-eagled on the rests, preparing, baring herself.

  What have I done to Duncan that you didn’t do?

  Of course what the lawyer’s getting at—what he wants is to be able to convince the judge that the self-confessed murderer is one to whom, because of a devout Catholic background, his own crime is abhorrent. The confession itself is certainly a strong point; he confesses his sin, through the highest secular law of the land, to the law of God. He throws himself on God’s mercy. Jesus Christ died for all others, to kill another is to act in aberration against the Christian ethic in which the boy was brought up, and which is within him still.

  And perhaps if she—seated across the room, outside walking the dog, hanging up her clothes before bed, lying beside him with her beeper handy (to hell with them)—if she could have gone beyond the intelligence of the microscope and the pathologist’s finding to intelligence (in its real sense, of true knowledge) that there is much that exists but cannot be known, proved in a testtube or by comparison with placebo results—if she had not been stunted in this dimension of being, the boy might have been the man who at twenty-seven could not possibly bring himself to kill, to have become someone more terrible than the water. ‘Didn’t try to influence him one way or the other.’ But wasn’t that statement her very position? Its power. Mother managed perfectly well to be a loving mother, to do good and care for others by healing the sick. She could look after herself. She quite evidently needed no-one to be accountable to for control of any of the temptations every child and adolescent knows about, to lie, to cheat, to use aggression to get what you want. ‘They turn to the mother.’ Then what he found there was a self-sufficiency of the material kind—and that includes the doctoring, expert preoccupation with the flesh—which if it was enough for her wasn’t enough for him. If that’s what he did settle for when he stopped coming to church.

  Stopped; oh but that doesn’t necessarily mean he stopped believing, lost God. That’s something this father does not know any more than does his mother. Even though, while he himself finds communion not only with God but with the unknown people around him in the cathedral in the wrong end of the city, a communion with life which guards him against the possibility of harming anyone, any one of them, no matter what they may be, he knows that there are men and women who remain close to God without partaking of the ritual before a priest. Her son may still believe, in spite of her; my son.

  And then again that other special intelligence: of the lawyer, the best Senior Counsel you can get. He knows what he wants, what will serve. It could be that he’ll want to present two moral influences; religious faith from the father, secular humanism from the mother. The two sets of moral precepts the whole world relies on—what else is there—to keep at bay our instinct to violence, to plant bombs, to set ablaze, to force the will of one against the other in all the kinds of rape, not only of the vagina and the anus, but of the mind and emotions, to take up a gun and shoot a friend, the housemate, in the head. What a strong argument for the Defence a dramaturge like Motsamai could mak
e of that: the force of perversion and evil the woman Natalie must have been to bring this accused to fling aside into a clump of fern the sound principles with which he was imbued: one, the sacred injunction, Thou Shalt Not Kill, two, the secular code, human life is the highest value to be respected.

  A visit before he goes from one destination to another he’s made for himself; prison to madhouse.

  The meek trudge along the corridors where some black prisoner is always on his knees polishing, polishing, the place where all the dirt and corruption of life is quarantined must be kept obsessively clean. If only there were to be disinfectants to wash away the pain, of victims and their criminals, held here. What is Claudia thinking : that he couldn’t have done it? Does she still hang on to that. Much use. Much good it will do any of us.

  In a house, in an executive director’s office, in a surgery, each day nothing is ever the same as at the last entry. A flower in a vase has dropped petals. The waste baskets have been emptied of yesterday, an ashtray displaced. A delivery of pathologists’ reports has been made.

  The visiting room and the table and two chairs and the watching walls are always exactly the same. Two warders, one on either side of the accused, now, are the same nobodies; only Duncan is the element out of place, doesn’t belong here. Duncan is Duncan, his face, the timbre of his voice, the very angle of his ears—the visitors’ attention sets about him a nimbus, the existence of his presence elsewhere, as it surely must be if there is any continuity in being alive, in the places in the city that know him, in the townhouse, come for Sunday lunch; in that cottage. They bring with them himself; having never experienced prison before, they do not know that this is what a prisoner receives from visitors.