The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Where Claudia had gone reluctantly in summons to Counsel’s chambers, she and Harald together now badgered Hamilton Motsamai for his time. What they wanted from him was wiliness, a special kind of shrewd ability a lay individual could not have and that people whose generalized prejudices they used to find distasteful attributed to lawyers who belonged to certain races. Jewish or Indian lawyers, those were the ones. Would a black lawyer have the same secret resources? Was it a sharpened edge that could be acquired in legal practice and training? Or was it in the making of a racial stereotype brought about originally by the necessity of those certain races to find ways of defeating laws that discriminated against them? In which case, why shouldn’t Hamilton have developed every natural instinct of life-saving wiliness and shrewdness, who better? Why should he be presumed to have forgone it forever in exchange for the lofty professional rectitude of an Aryan member of the Bar who had never lived on the Other Side? Was it there in his chambers, slyly, under the gaze of the framed photographs of his presence among distinguished Gray’s Inn colleagues in London? Harald thought it was; the whole approach to the girl, the prying into her motivation in the relationship with their son, was to him an indication. But Claudia, in conflict with the trust she had come to place in the man, wondered whether one of the others, spoken of by people whose admiration was also denigration, would not be the right advocate for any means, any means whatever, that could be found to defend their son. A Jew, an Indian. Though she did not say so, her husband understood; many compromises with stereotype attitudes easily rejected in their old safe life were coming about now that the other values of that time had been broken with. Once there has been killing, what else matters? Only what might save another. The townhouse ethics of doctor, board member, are trivial.

  Hamilton responded with zest to the new attitude he sensed in them. As if he had been coaxing it all along, ah-hêh, ah-hêh, nice decent white couple from their unworld. He did not see, or pretended not to see, that they thought they were making some challenging disguised demand for him to do something, anything unethical (as they saw it) in defence of their son. The ignorance of educated people, white and black, of the conventions of the law was endlessly surprising, probably she would have the same thing to say about people and the practice of medicine. They still did not understand the scope to be claimed by a leading Counsel in defence tactics. How else could one take on representation of a self-confessed murderer?

  —Couldn’t you use what’s the man’s name—Julian—the one who told us, the one Duncan called right away, that night? I have the feeling he dislikes the girl, he’s been present at scenes she made that shocked him, when she behaved—Idon’t know—wildly, provocative towards Duncan in the way you’ve said will be important. —

  —My Heads of Argument, yes.—He encourages Claudia.

  —Things you can get out of him. Although he strikes me as being reluctant to talk because he’s got some idea of the confidentiality of friendship and all that. Loyalty to what went on in that house, maybe he’s afraid of others reproaching him …—

  —Oh you are right. I’ve been working on him. Withdrawn fellow. But the point is, what you say about the house, those who frequent it or live there—true, he likes to have found favour with them, but he’s really attached to Duncan, Duncan’s the one who matters to him. But I doubt if he’s worth calling as a witness.—

  Harald keeps in pursuit of the other, Khulu.—Isn’t he more impressive? If I were a judge I’d give more weight to what he might be prepared to say. And he actually is a member of that household, he’s not someone who happens to work with Duncan, a colleague from outside, a friend who wasn’t always around to observe what went on. Whereas Khulu.—

  —And Khulu is gay. Ah-heh. He knows the kind of morals, whatever you like to call it, what’s done and not done, in the way they arrange their lives, settle things between them.—

  I mean

  Could it

  Not that

  Ah-hêh

  I mean

  Just a moment

  But if

  Let me explain

  They become animated, it’s both a consultation and a contest. Blessedly for his clients in trouble, Duncan has become an issue, not there, present among them in his prison cell as he usually is when the parents are in chambers.

  The plumber’s assistant-cum-gardener: is he worth calling?

  —With what purpose? The State can have him!—Motsamai is suddenly very attractive when he laughs, some persona he keeps for other occasions breaks out of protocol, whether it comes from his place, distinguished by the African cut of his beard-wisp, in a coterie of ancient aristocracy, or whether it is his mastery of the other, the legal fraternity’s bonhomie in chambers’ dining-room.

  The vulgar street term isn’t used here: get him off. But it is mutually understood in its limitations. What his clients are asking, they and their Counsel know cannot set Duncan free; free of what he says he has done, free of what contains him as he was once in his mother’s womb, unseen. Punished he must be, whether by the will of his father’s God or the man-made laws his mother lives by. The term can serve only as the means, all and every means, to set him out of reach of what is still on the Statute Book. His life for a life.

  —And I’m going to need more from you two. You realize that. Ah-hêh … much more. In that area (a spread of the raised hand in the air) we haven’t talked enough. Not nearly enough. What was he like, growing up. Really like. Any problems you might have seen then. What might have affected his reactions later, conflicts and so forth. Some of the things you’ve forgotten, you think over and done with.—

  It was as if blinds rattled up from the accord in that room, shadowless clarity fell upon them.

  There never were any.

  He was a happy boy.

  But this was not spoken.

  PART TWO

  Why is Duncan not in the story? He is a vortex from which, flung away, around, are all: Harald, Claudia, Motsamai, Khulu, the girl, and the dead man.

  His act has made him a vacuum; a vacuum is the antithesis of life. If they cannot understand how he could do what he did, neither does he. Except the girl; she might, she would. She was prepared to kill; herself. That’s the nearest you could get to the act upon another. The act itself, not the meaning. He does not remember the act itself; the lawyer believes him or wants to, needs to believe him, but the prosecutor, the judge and the assessors, whoever it is who will be told this will not believe him. He did not, in the words of the lawyer’s question, ‘premeditate’ what he did. It was enacted so quickly, a climax that is over, the unbearable emotion out of grasp, gone. He can follow the sight of the gun lying there, but that is the night before, some idiot was talking of buying one and had asked to be shown how to use the thing. The house gun. It was always somewhere about, no use having it for protection if when the time came no-one would remember where it was safely stashed away. He can see it put down, forgotten, on the table among the bottles and glasses, the night before. And when they—Jespersen, Natalie, the two of them—washed the dishes, cleared up, made love on the sofa, they left it there. The time came. They left it there for him.

  He doesn’t see it when he follows how he found them. Exactly how he found them is clear in every detail. They’re both dressed (that’s the way she likes it), only their genitals offered each to the other, her skirt bunched out of the way and his backside still half-covered by his pants as he’s busy inside her. They egg each other on with the sounds that are, he can’t stop himself hearing, familiar to him from both of them, and at the very moment they realize someone has come upon them they are seized by what they can’t stop, it’s happening in front of him, it seems to him that’s what it’s always like, if you could see yourself, a contortion, an epileptic fit. He fled from it. He thought he heard her laughing and crying. He sat in the dark in the cottage waiting for her to feel her way in and say, That’s all there is to it, so! But this time it’s not all there is to it.

&
nbsp; How many nights in their terrible hours after their good hours, middle of the night had she stood over him shaking her head of flying hair, a Fury (oh yes, put me on a pillar or something in your Greek classical post-post-modern whateveritis architecture) laughing and crying—they’re the same to her—and bending to him as if he were deaf: ‘You faggot! Why don’t you go back to one of your boys! Go on, go over to the house if I don’t suit you, you want to make me over, Mr Godalmighty.’ She, to whom everything was permissible, would not hesitate to abuse him for what she actually regarded as of no account. In confidence in the freedom of experience, of emotions, she professed and practised, he had done what he never should have—told her of the incident, no, be honest, it was more than that: the time with Jespersen. Given her a weapon to whirl above his head, hold at his throat, and when she saw in him the reaction she wanted, whip away as a big joke.

  The awful torrent of her ranting came back to torture him in the cell. She had him cornered there. The most articulate being he had ever known, a kind of curse in her. You dragged me back you made me puke my death out of my lungs you revived me after the madhouse of psychopath doctors you plan you planned to save me in the missionary position not only on my back good taste married your babies because I gave mine away like the bitch who eats the puppy she’s whelped develop ‘careers’ you invent for me because that’s what a woman you’ve saved should have you took away from me my death for that for what you decide I live for said I must stop punishing myself but here’s news for you if I stay with you it’s because I choose I choose the worst punishment I can find for myself I revel in it do you know that

  It does not end there. It flows from all the nights they talked until three in the morning, high on her words, they hardly needed anything else. And all the time while she enraged and flayed him—he heard again what he had thrown at her in place of a blow of his hand against her mouth, one violence resisted only for another: I should have let you die. I wish I had let you die—he had been aware in the most intense sorrow of lines she had written for him in one of her poems ‘I’m a candle flame that sways/in currents of air you can’t see./You need to be the one/who steadies me to burn.’ He had not done this for her; he was not the one.

  I should have let you die.

  Does this mean he wanted to kill her. Look back on his Eurydice he had brought from the Shades, so that she could follow him no more. Rid of her and loving her so much; choosing her disastrously as she said she chose him.

  That would have been premeditated. How many times had he stayed the hand that was to go out against her mouth. She was right when she taunted him about his middle-class background; what’s it all about but docility, she laughed. Your parents—a pair of self-righteous prigs. Your father took you to church, he’s a confessing Christian but real Christians are rebels they’ve gone to prison for what they see is wrong instead of taking their piddling little sins to the priest behind the curtain pretending to stand in for God up in heaven. Your mama’s a good liberal, which means she deplored, oh yes, what went on in this country in the old days and let other people risk themselves to change it.

  And you (had he said it to her) you think you are an anarchist, and anarchy has no form, it’s chaos you are, and it’s what I’ve left my drawing board for.

  All day in the cottage waiting for her to come back and she did not. Other times when there’d been an affair, she disappearing for a few days somewhere, she had reappeared with the little carryall that was provision enough for a weekend with a lover, she had been unapologetic (she was a free being) but calm, obviously pleased to see him. Once she even brought him a souvenir she had collected, a fossil fragment. She could get away with such improbable gestures. There had followed a night of talk. He desired her strongly all through it but did not want to be so soon where another man had been. After a day or two they made love again, and for her it was as if nothing had intervened. That’s all there is to it.

  At last, in the late afternoon he got up from their bed where he had lain all day and went over to the house. But first, the strange ordinary movements gone through, he opened a can of pet food, placed it in a bowl outside the door; the dog prancing and leaping about him in anticipation, the simple joy of appetite, existence. He went to the house. He didn’t want to speak to anyone but he heard himself in silent monologue and this time the words were not to be in the middle of the night and not with her. He did not know what he was saying, going to say. He was aggrieved right to the back of his throat, stopped up there. If he had any purpose at all it was to know what whoever was listening to his silence would say. It was Jespersen. Jespersen was lying on the same sofa.

  So he came upon him again.

  The man lifted his head and smiled, opening his eyes wide under cocked brows and pulling down the comers of his mouth, his familiar attractive representation of culpability in the style of an accomplished mime. What he said was: Oh dear. I’m sorry, Bra. The form of address picked up from the black frequenters of the communal house came in handy to assert between the two of them overall brotherhood which would absorb any transgressions.

  It was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.

  Bewilderment exploded; he had not had in mind anything but her, she was what was filling him right up to the source of speech, she was what he was carrying before him in accusation, the corpse of his emotions. With the enactment of those words, that facial gesture there came the stun of that previous blow, he felt again, saw lying there relaxed in one of those remembered Japanese cotton gowns and flexing the toes of a muscular foot in favoured sandals, the tom bereavement of that rejection which he had long thought of as a forgotten phase in the evolvement that living is, as the passions and frustrations of adolescence dwindle to their minor proportions. It was Jespersen who was lost; lost in the body of the girl. Jespersen too, was the corpse of life. This man had himself destroyed it all, everything, the meaning of himself and the meaning of the girl, in the contortions, the hideous fit of their coupling.

  Talk. Jespersen with his sing-song Norwegian English talked reason that was obvious. We are not children. We don’t own each other. We want to live freely don’t we. We shouldn’t stifle impulses that bring people together, whether it’s going to be sex or taking a long walk, never mind, eh. The walk is over, the sex is over, it was a nice time, that’s it, isn’t it. Just unfortunate we were a bit too impulsive. I mean, she’s a girl who usually arranges things more privately, doesn’t she. All of us know it … you know it, my Bra. It hasn’t changed things with you and her before. You see, you should never follow anyone around, never, that’s a mistake, that’s for the people who make a prison out of what they feel and lock someone up inside. If it hadn’t turned out the way you made it turn out, she’s a great girl you’ve got, she would never have given it another thought and me too, for me no claims just part of the good evening we had, the drinks, the laughs she and I had cleaning up together. Why don’t you help yourself to a drink.

  Talk.

  All through the talk there was another babble going on inside him as if the tuning knob of a transistor were racing from frequency to frequency, snatches and blarings of the past, of the night, other nights, despair, self-hatred, inexpressible tenderness, raw disgust, insupportable rage for which there was no means of order. The communications of the brain were blown. He could not know what it was he thought, felt under the talk, talk, talk. It was the grand apocalypse of all the talk through all the nights until three in the morning. It was that he must have put an end to when he picked up the house gun left lying in his peripheral vision and shot their lover, his and hers, in the head.

  That’s all there is to it.

  Of course he would never do such a thing. So that is why there is nothing to explain to those poor two when they come to sit with him in the visitors’ room. What there was, is, in himself he did not know about, they certainly did not, cannot know. The clever lawyer must make up an expl
anation. We are now in your hands, Bra. It was the lawyer who told him the post-mortem confirmed that Carl, Carl Jespersen, was dead of a gunshot in the head. That was how he came to believe it. He had not seen Carl bleed. He had not waited to see what picking up the house gun had done. He had fled as he fled into the garden when he overturned and broke a lamp in his mother’s bedroom as a child. If the death sentence is to be carried out perhaps the brain should go to research; maybe there is an explanation to be found there that might be useful. To society. All he can do for the two in the visitors’ room is hope that society won’t subject them to much publicity when the trial begins. He has status as a big-business target for the journalists in one sector, she has status as a target in the sector of good works for humanity; people will like to see what press photographers can show of people of status whose son has done what he never could do. But perhaps it will go unnoticed, what is an indoor killing (homeground in the suburbs), lovers’ obscure quarrel, gays’ domestic jealousy, something of that kind, in comparison with the spectacular public violence where you can film or photograph people shot dead on the streets in crossfire of the new hit-squads, hired by taxi drivers and drug dealers who have learnt their tactics from the state hit-squads of the old regime with its range of methods of ‘permanently removing’ political opponents, from blowing them up with car and parcel bombs to knifing their bodies again and again to make bloodily sure bullets have done their work.

  If something could be found in the lobes of the brain to explain how all, all these, like himself, could do these things; continue to wound and savage and, final achievement of it all, kill.

  A house gun. If it hadn’t been there how could you defend yourself, in this city, against losing your hi-fi equipment, your television set and computer, your watch and rings, against being gagged, raped, knifed. If it hadn’t been there the man on the sofa would not be under the ground of the city.