The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  He is all right, yes; they are all right, yes. His mother lightly strokes her hand down the side of her cheek to convey appreciation of his beard, which has grown out wiry ginger-bright rather like the filaments of light-bulbs. The preamble is over.

  No mention is made of the place to which he has been committed by Motsamai to be observed and assessed for his capacity to know what he learned from them, to distinguish right from wrong. They talk obliquely round it.

  —The lawyer’s been to see me at the surgery. Quite an interrogation. Asking me all about what you were like, as a child and growing up.—

  —Yes.—

  Harald made as if to speak. The distraction was ignored by mother and son.

  —Duncan, do you think I’ve had any particular influence on you? Anything I did?—

  —My mother; of course. But you both had an influence on my life, how could it be otherwise. It’s not a question. Everything you’ve done for me. And why you did it. What do you want me to say? You’ve loved me. You know all that. I know all that.—

  This kind of statement would never be made anywhere else but in this dislocated anteroom of their lives.

  He looks at them both waiting, each for accusation or judgment from him.

  —The letter.—

  That’s all he has said. But it is as if with the sureness of his architectural draughtsmanship he has drawn lines confining the three of them in a triangle.

  —So you do still remember when your father and I came to see you at the school after what happened that time.—

  —But you’d first written a letter. I might even still have it somewhere.—

  —D’you remember who signed it?—

  —Dad … it’s so long ago.—

  —But you remembered about it.—

  He was suddenly gentle with his mother.—You repeated what was there—you’ve forgotten—when you came the other day.—

  —The lawyer—he asked whether you believe in God.—Claudia brings it out.

  But he smiles (it is always disturbingly extraordinary when he smiles in this place, an indiscretion before the two lay figures of warders), and so she can smile with him.

  —Yes. Nothing’s irrelevant to Motsamai. He’s a very thorough man.—

  —I had the feeling he was fishing for something. Expected to find, with me. Well, you’ve been an adult a long time.—

  It was to his father he said as usual, his form of farewell this time as any other, that he was running out of books.—I’ll need them, in that place.—

  —Apparently we’re asked not to visit you although as a doctor they can’t really prevent me. Remember that. If anything—anything at all—something goes wrong, insist on your right to call us.—

  —Have you ever read Thomas Mann? I’ll bring you ‘The Magic Mountain’.—

  In the car, Harald speaks.

  He didn’t answer you.

  About what?

  But he knows she knows.

  Faith. God.

  It was pretty clear, wasn’t it. If ‘nothing is irrelevant’ to Motsamai, this—question, whatever—is something irrelevant to Duncan, doesn’t exist in his life.

  That’s how you want to understand his dodging what you suddenly sprang on him out of the blue. The most intimate question. You put him in your dock.

  But Harald, also, has not answered what she put to him, elsewhere. That must mean he does believe she is more responsible than he for what has happened to Duncan, what Duncan has become. She follows the thought aloud: What Duncan has become —whatever that is, neither of us wants to admit what it might be. I mean, how could anyone, how can we be expected—

  He, great reader, corrects her imprecision with his superior vocabulary.

  Too naive in our security.

  Claudia resists the impulse to say thank you very much; self-disparagement is damaging to health, let him indulge in it on his own.

  All their lives they must have believed—defined—morality as the master of passions. The controller. Whether this unconscious acceptance came from the teachings of God’s word or from a principle of self-imposed restraint in rationalists. And it can continue unquestioned in any way until something happens at the extreme of transgression, rebellion: the catastrophe that lies at the crashed limit of all morality, the unspeakable passion that takes life. The tests of morality they’ve known—each has known of the other—are ludicrous: whether Harald should allow his accountant to attribute so-called entertainment expenses to income tax relief, whether the doctor should supply a letter certifying absence from work due to illness when the patient had succumbed only to a filched holiday. But what is trivial at one, harmless, end of the scale—where does it stop. No need to think about that, all their lives, either of them, because the mastery has never needed to be tested any further. My God (his God) no! Where do the taboos really begin? Where did their son follow on from their limits beyond anything they could ever have envisaged him—their own—following. Oh they feel they own him now, as if he were again the small child they were forming by precept and example: by what they themselves were. Parents. Since they were once in this adult conspiracy together, neither can get away with absolving him- or herself of their son’s extension of their limits, any more than they can grant absolution from the self-accusations that preoccupy each. Separately, they have lost all interest in and concentration on their activities and are shackled together, each solitary, in the inescapable proximity that chafes them. Incongruous invasions dart each in the midst of conversations with other people which concern, naturally, the normal world they move about in without right. Targeted, they carry these strikes home to the townhouse, and out of the silence, against the touch of cutlery on plates or the voice of the newscaster mouthing from the TV screen, statements without context burst forth.

  You’ve got a good holding in tobacco shares, haven’t you? You know people who’ve died of lung cancer. You have No Smoking signs all over your offices. But the dividends are fine.

  There is a context; they’re in it. He would never have believed she could be a spiteful woman. He prepares himself, although he is not sure of the exact issue, it must belong somewhere to the only subject they have.

  He laughs. Dull-weary. We’re eating chicken and you bought it. I suppose it’s one raised in cruel conditions. Caged.

  The last word hits home. What concern is there for chickens while you talk to your son within the walls of a prison.

  I’m asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.

  It’s the ultimate, isn’t it. Is that what you mean.

  No I don’t.

  Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal—

  Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don’t think I do. I just believe in damage; don’t damage. That’s what he was taught, that’s what he knows—knew. So now—is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.

  Of course it’s not. I’ve said: it’s the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.

  Before God. She pushes him to it.

  Before God and man.

  I thought for believers there is the way out by confession, repentance, forgiveness from Up There.

  Not for me.

  Oh why? She won’t let him off.

  Because there is no recompense for the one whose life is taken. Nothing can come to him. It’s only the one who killed that receives grace.

  In this world. What about the next. Harald, you don’t accept your faith.

  Not on this issue, no.

  So you sin with doubt. Is that only now? Her gaze is explicit.

  No, always. You don’t know because it’s never been possible to talk to you about such things.

  Sorry about that, all I could do was respect your need for that kind of belief. I couldn’t take up something I’m convinced does’t exist. Anyway—you’ve allowed yourself the same latitude I have between what does and what doesn’t count. Even with your God behind you.

  Oh
leave me alone. I’m a killer because you see people die of lung cancer.

  At what point does what’s let pass become serious. Harald? If God allows you to condone so much in yourself how do you decide someone won’t take the example that you don’t have to follow the rules because the people who’ve taught you to don’t do so themselves. Of course they know when to stop. Because nothing in their lives goes any further. They’re safe. Making money out of cigarettes, that’s not much of a sin for a good Christian.

  Claudia is not looking at him as she speaks. Her head is turned away. If it were to control tears it would break the tension which is both hostile and exciting, his heart gushes like a geyser at his breast, against her. She does not offer tears; she asserts the severance of not seeing him. What has happened has brought into the order of the townhouse what it wasn’t built to contain; she’s right, there—their life together was not equipped to sustain itself so far, to this edge. People have ambition that their sons should go further ; theirs has made of this a horror.

  She said once, What did I do to him that you didn’t do? He wanted to say now in his controlled voice that he could use with the force of a shout, And what is it I didn’t do for him that you didn’t do? Why me? Because I’m the man. That sudden resort to the female tactic. Putting on the sheep’s clothing of weakness when it suits you. I’m the man and so I’m responsible, I buy shares whose profits you spend, money that kills, I made him a murderer, a dead chicken and a man with a bullet through the head, it’s all on the road to hell.

  Hostility had sucked all communication into its vacuum. If he’d opened his mouth, God knows what would have come out.

  So Harald is able to believe his son did it and that he must be punished. No confession (already made), repentance in exchange for forgiveness possible. So much for the compassion of Harald’s God and of his Only Son who was conceived not of penetration and sperm (because that’s human and dirty) but who took on himself all human sin to cleanse all others who sin. So much for the religious faith that the father had lived by in moral superiority, going off to pray and confess (what?) every week, and every Sunday taking the small boy with him to give him the guidance for his life, the brotherly love and compassion decreed from on high while the mother turned over in bed and went back to sleep. She carried about within her the wretched apostasy of the father as she had carried the foetus he had implanted when she was nineteen.

  The great eye of the sun bleared under a cataract of cloud: the diffused glare confused the planes of the face so that for a few moments Harald and Claudia were not sure which black face this was. They were in the parking ground among police vans, he locked the car with the touch on the electronic device, out of habit, they were turned to the fortress. There was recognition acknowledging them, in the face; they and the man approached each other across the space between arrival and the entrance doors that always seemed so long to cover. Khulu. What was it again: Dladla. From the property where the cottage was. From the house, the sofa. He was leaving after a visit to Duncan. Duncan was back in a cell from the madhouse. They were going to Duncan. A strange suffusion of warmth accompanied their coincidence. Harald had not seen the man since waiting in the house stared at by that other eye, the computer, Claudia probably had not seen him at all since some invitation to the house given by their son in a time before what happened. She found no purpose, nothing to be learnt in going to be confronted by the place, it could only be like being forced to look at a grave where after a post-mortem duly performed a man had been stowed out of mind. The victim disappears, the perpetrator remains. It could only rouse revulsion at what the room had witnessed, and she couldn’t risk this revulsion against the one who said he had performed the act.

  Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla. He, too, brought to the prison what was missing, Duncan himself, somewhere existing outside. Any grim redolence of the house he had about him was evaporated in the glare on prison gravel; they felt some sort of gratitude. They had no-one else; only Hamilton.

  A curved tooth of some captured feline set in gold tangled with an ornate Ethiopian cross on the broad breast in the opening of a shirt left unbuttoned. A gleam of cuff-links and a red-stone ring —these elaborations along with the other, anti-materialist convention of frayed jeans and sneakers—he was normality, a variety of contemporary ordinariness made surprising, simple freedom appearing in the sterility of this space before blind walls, like a daisy pushing up through stones.

  —No, man, he’s okay. I think so. I really do. I would have come before but, like, I didn’t know how he’d feel. To see me, and so on. He’s all right.—

  This was one of the two friends who had found their friend with his sandal hanging from the thong on his foot, killed by a bullet from a gun that belonged casually to all who used the house, shared brotherly as the cigarette packs lying about and the drinks in the kitchen. He was one of two friends who ran to the cottage to tell their other friend something terrible had happened.

  And suddenly, as they stood so close together in shelter before the prison he’d left and they were about to enter, his face very near them struggled with a changing tension of muscles and his eyes, appalled by what was overcoming him, grew large, brimming. He drew tears through his nose with the unashamed snort of a child.

  Claudia put a hand on his arm.

  But a man must not be patronized or humiliated by the hiatus of another man’s silence: Harald himself had been blinded in this way, once, driving back from the prison at the beginning of awaiting trial.—I’m sure he was glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Thank you.—

  Duncan’s manner stopped their mouths against any concern about how the ordeal under scrutiny among the schizophrenics and demented had passed. And he did not acknowledge to them that there had been a visitor before them. He had ready a list of things he wanted attended to and time was on his heels, they must know as well as he did, by now, how soon the warders would shift from one heavy foot to another: back to the cell. There was a distanced practicality in his delivery. As if the probing of doctors had shaken him out of some stunned condition, in there, that place where the human mind in all the frightening distortions of its complexity is exposed. They were to get in touch with Julian Verster (they would know how to do that? If not at home, then at the firm, the architects’ office) and get him to remove what was still on his, Duncan’s, drawing board. Plans. The work he was in the middle of. —I can do it here. They can’t stop me. Motsamai’s arranged it. And tell Julian to bring everything I need, everything, down to the last pen. Motsamai’s arranged for a table.—

  Harald noted dictated payments that had to be made: overdue. Time must have been destroyed with everything else in Duncan’s life, and now the sense of what had passed, stopped dead at the moment of the act, had to be reckoned with. Insurance for the car. And it ought to be put up on blocks. To protect the tyres. The battery disconnected. Unless she would like to use it—for a moment the son was aware of her, remembered as if it were to be taken seriously his mother’s jaunty enjoyment when she once tried out driving the second-hand Italian sports car; a vehicle for the transport of a young man’s past life.

  —The policy should be in a drawer. The bedroom. A file with other things.—

  Harald has no need to make a note of this, he has been there before, looking into what was not for his eyes.

  There were letters for posting. These were allowed by the prison authorities to be handed over, awaiting trial there are still some personal rights left, and Harald put the envelopes under the flap of his jacket pocket without looking at them. His son watched the letters stowed, as if à ship were disappearing over his horizon; no horizon within prison walls. And he knows these two will look to see to whom he’s writing letters, once they’re away from this place. And they’ll want to know, desperately want to know what’s inside, what someone like him has to say to these names they recognize or don’t recognize. (Everyone wants to know what’s inside him, everyone.) They’ll want to know because what
he’s thinking is what he’ll write and what he’s thinking in the cell is what he is, the mystery he is for them, my poor mother and father.

  They promised a twelve-year-old boy that whatever he did, anything, whatever he was, anything, they would always be there for him. And here they are, sitting facing him in the prison visitors’ room.

  Plan.

  The plan their son is going ahead to draw in a prison cell—office block, hotel, hospital—what is it—predicates something that will come about. Ahead. Belief. Steel and cement and glass, in this form; yet an assumption of a future.

  Messengers.

  The Senior Counsel’s secretary faxed the message and Harald Lindgard’s secretary brought the missive to his desk. She entered softly in consideration and laid it before him just as she would a letter for signature but of course she knew what such messages concerned. Mr Motsamai had set aside ‘the afternoon hours’ for them, three-thirty onwards. As usual, the attendant at chambers’ underground garage would reserve space for their car if Mr Lindgard’s secretary called to give the registration number. Whatever portent messengers bear they have no responsibility, cannot help; all she could do was call the attendant with the necessary information which, of course, she memorized as part of her job.

  Harald picked up Claudia at the surgery. Although the message had come at short notice—he heard her receptionist, Mrs February’s question, what should she do about patients’ appointments, when would the doctor expect to be back, answered with a gesture of dismissal. From Claudia, this time: to hell with them. But he saw it detachedly as the deterioration of her personality, since without the ethics of her doctoring she had no support.