The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  He was a happy boy. Wasn’t he. Claudia did not have to ask Harald that question. Of course he was. What did they have to recall from what—the lawyer attributed to them—they ‘thought over and done with’. As if there were to be something hidden; from him; from themselves. What did Duncan want of them. What did he need of them.

  Have you still got the letter?

  One of those box files in the old cupboard we brought when we moved. But there’s only the first page.

  Yes, he remembered; they had thought of it, unavoidable, in all their confusion after that Friday night. A terrible thing happened the boy wrote. They had accused each other over who was or was not responsible to tell their son we’re always there for you. Always.

  I was thinking it might be something for Hamilton. But I suppose not. It didn’t show any particular shock, the boy seemed to have dealt pretty well with whatever the business of that child hanging himself meant to him. We were the ones who were so disturbed.

  That he didn’t write that way doesn’t mean he didn’t feel it. Upset, afraid.

  But he couldn’t write it to us. Yes. Why.

  Children don’t say things outright. They offer some version for grownups to interpret. I know that from when I’m trying to diagnose a child.

  Harald lifted his head and his gaze wandered the room, in denial, seeking. One of them—Claudia, himself, that silly self-justifying argument they’d had—both of them had made the covenant with the boy, There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. But he had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him. He had not told them that he loved a man, or at least desired him, explored that emotion, although he had been taught to give expression to his emotions, nonsense that boys don’t cry. He had not told them that he had brought a girl from the water, lived with her in conflict with her embrace of death. He introduced young women for a drink on the terrace of the townhouse; an hour of talk about public events in the city, holidays, politics maybe, exchange of anecdotes and laughter, of opinions of a book both he and his father had read—and they might or might not see the woman again. This one whom he had taken in apparently permanently they had not seen much more of; he would walk in alone, you are always at home to your own son, and sit down to eat with them. Then there would be an old form of intimacy, a recognition between the three of them, you might call it, they would talk together in that privacy of family matters, their experiences in the different worlds of their work, he would tell his mother it concerned him that she worked such long hours and discuss with his father the possibility that he might hive off from the firm in which he was employed and start his own architectural practice more in accordance with his aesthetic directions. Once Harald had asked, You’re in love with this girl, and he had seemed to welcome the admittance coming from without.—I suppose I am.—

  But to say that was to be saying love was difficult; there were difficulties. Harald, Claudia should have read that. But there was freedom, his right to his own privacy: their form of love for him.

  The covenant meant nothing.

  It had been the most important commitment in their lives. Without it all the people whose old age she eased and the men, women and children whose wounds of many kinds she tended, were nothing, and without it all Harald’s love of God was nothing. And if he could have, no, would have come to them, would they have been able to stop in time, what happened? At what stage in the disorder that was taking over his life could that have been done? What—when—was the point before no return; when the girl was resuscitated—the basic form of ‘saved’—could he have been prevented, protected, from taking on to ‘save’ her in the final sense, in reconciliation to life? While it was obviously the self-destruction that was her dynamo, the very energy itself that attracted him to her?

  Or was there a point earlier, predating the girl. They thought —all this often surfaced and was spoken between them—about the homosexual episode. If it was that: an episode. Was that something at which a halt should have been called, was it to be seen, diagnosed, as a beginning of disintegration of a personality—and wasn’t theirs a heterosexual judgment of homosexuality as a ‘disintegration’! If he had told them of that attraction would it have been the right thing to counsel him in a worldly way, suggest that for him it was a matter of the ambience in that house, a fashion, the beguilement of male bonding in a period—his adulthood—and a place where social groupings were in transition. In that house, as the saying goes: no problem, black and white, brothers in bed together.

  There could have been that.

  But then Harald thought about it alone, at night, and came back to bed to find her awake. Perhaps if we had had a chance, if he could have come to us then—it would have been a mistake to see the Jespersen thing as an episode. Maybe that was the stability for him.

  You mean the life in that house. That way.

  Yes. Saving the girl: it was an attempt to make himself something he’s not. Someone like us. I don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself wanting to make love to a man. I don’t know whether I would have been wanting to run away from myself. Coming from our sort of background. Maybe he should have stayed with men. That was really for him. If not Jespersen, there would have been someone else and they might have had a better life together in the cottage than the sordid mess he committed himself to with a woman.

  She got up out of their bed.

  What’re you doing?

  Over at the window, she drew back the curtains, it was a night shiny-black as wet coal and a plane making for the airport trailed its own constellation of landing lights up along the stars. The world was witnessing. D’you think that’s what he would have wanted from us?

  Get back to bed.

  They were closer, coming upon discoveries in one another’s being, than they had been since first they had met, when they were young and in the novelty of perilous human intimacy.

  The Constitutional Court has gone into deliberation on the verdict and Harald and Claudia have no information as to how long this may take.

  For them, their son has been already on trial—this trial in a court other than the one in which he will appear—and is awaiting a Last Judgment above any that may be within the jurisdiction to be handed down when his own case is heard. Motsamai is sympathetically condescending, reiterating reassurance.—I know you don’t believe me. Ah-hêh … I know what you think: what can I know if the whole question has been argued before the highest authority we have except the President of the country and God Himself, and those judges haven’t been able to come up with a verdict? But it may take them many weeks. My concern for my client does not include any fears about the outcome. What will emerge will be the end of the Death Penalty. My concern is to demonstrate without any doubt that this young man was driven by circumstances to act totally against his own nature. This woman, and the individual who was once more than his friend—the pair betrayed him out of his mind!—

  There were other people in trouble waiting to be received by him. He ushered these two to the door of chambers.—Look, I want you to meet my wife, and my son—we’ve applied for medical school for him, I don’t know if he’s got the aptitude, you could give us some good advice, Claudia? What about this Friday evening? I hope you’ll get a good dinner. I’ll be coming back from the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein, so let’s say around eight-thirty, something like that.—

  The aplomb glossed urbanely over the sensitivity to their situation; he knew how it was, they would be in retreat from the company of friends whose sympathetic faces served only to set them apart from the basis of old friendship, common circumstances no longer shared. It was not always necessary or desirable to keep the relationship with clients formal. Taking on a brief means establishing the confidence of human feeling, some sort of give-and-take, with the family of the life to be defended, even while retaining professional objectivity. This white couple didn’t have the resilience that blacks have acquired in all their gen
erations of being people in trouble by the nature of their skins. He knows how to handle these two: they’ll feel they’re able to do something for him; that aside about wanting advice on a career for an ambitious son.

  When they are in the visitors’ room neither lets surface their preoccupation with the unknown deliberations of the Constitutional Court. It was not the first time they had had to employ this tact; there are so many subjects and reactions that are inappropriate to display to someone living unimaginably, exposed there before you only for a half-hour between two prison warders. The prisoner is a stranger who should not be confronted with what can be dealt with only in the familiarity of freedom. Certainly Duncan knew of the subject of the first sitting of the Constitutional Court; he had access to newspapers but he—also out of tact, it’s a two-way process if it’s to make these visits possible—he does not speak of it either. Or perhaps it is because they could not even begin to comprehend what the proceedings of that Court must have meant to him as he followed reports. A man who declares himself guilty, is he declaring himself ready to die? Or does he, as only he can, know himself in the death cells with Makwanyane and Mchunu, asserting the right to life no matter what he has done?

  They ask him instead if he’s able to make progress with the plans he’s drawing and he says yes he is, he is, the work is going well enough.

  —It’s pretty remarkable you manage all that.—Harald is admiring; admiration is a form of encouragement that’s admissible.

  —The only problem is I don’t get a chance to discuss any difficulty that comes up. With the others at the office, as we generally do. So this really will be all my own work … a bit eccentrically so, who knows.—

  —Maybe someone from the firm could come and talk about it with you. Why not.—Harald is prepared to ask the senior partners for this service (if his junior colleague Verster had been the right person Duncan surely would have mentioned him); prison is not a disease, there’s nothing infectious to keep clear of, in this visitors’ room.

  —Not worth the trouble. When I’ve finished the draft plan Motsamai will take it out and someone’ll look at it.—

  What is really being said here is that he understands that if the Last Judgment is going to be in his favour and will ensure that his life will not end now, it still has to be endured: back to the drawing board. But what that means to him, having once sacrificed the life of order for chaos, is something that cannot be conveyed.

  When they retreat down the corridors behind the riding buttocks of the usual warder, Claudia—and maybe Harald—envies a woman taking the same route who humbly tries to hide her face in a scarf as she brays aloud, like a beast of burden, in tears.

  Claudia supposed they couldn’t very well refuse. They preferred to be at home together, these days. Best off like that. Recently Harald had taken tickets for a chamber music concert, his favourite César Franck on the programme, but the paths music takes are so vital, unlike the perceptions that divert in a film or a play—it drove them even deeper into their isolation.

  He means well. Harald was familiar with the combination of business interests and a certain trace of personal liking come about, of course, that prompted such invitations.

  Harald and Claudia had never been to a black man’s home before. This kind of gesture on both sides—the black man asking, the white man accepting—was that of the Left-wing circles to which they had not belonged during the old regime, and of the circles of hastily-formed new liberals of whose conversion they were sceptical. If they themselves in the past had not had the courage to act against the daily horrors of the time as the Left Wing did beyond dinner parties, risking their professions and lives, at least neither he nor she sought to disguise this lack (of guts: Harald faced it for himself, as he now did other soft moral options taken) by dining and wining it away. Black fellow members on the Board; well, they were no longer content to be names listed on letterheads; they were raising issues and influencing decisions; recognizing this—that at least had some meaning? And Claudia—she had something remote from anything he had, familiarity with the feel and touch of blacks’ flesh, knowing it to be like her own, always had known—an accusation, too, for all she failed to do further, in the past, but a qualification for the present; she didn’t need any gesture of passing the salt across a dinner table.

  The address Motsamai’s secretary handed on his card was in a suburb that had been built in the Thirties and Forties by white businessmen of the second generation of money. Their fathers had immigrated in the years when gold-mining was growing from the panning by adventurers to an industry making profit for shareholders and creating a city of consumers; they were pedlars and shopkeepers who became processors of maize the millions of blacks who had lost the land they grew their food on couldn’t subsist without, manufacturers of building materials, clothing, furniture, importers of cigars, radios, jewellery, carpets. Their educated sons had the means of their fathers’ success to indulge in the erection of houses they believed to express the distinction of old money; dwellings like the ones the fathers might have looked on from their cottages and izbas in another country: the counts’ mansions, the squires’ manors. Architects they employed interpreted these ideas in accordance with their own conception of prestige and substance, the plantation-house pillars of the Deep South and the solid flounced balconies from which in Italy fascists of the period were making speeches. In the gardens, standard equipment, were swimming pools and tennis courts.

  Some of the fortunes had declined so that portions of the grounds had been sold, some of the sons had emigrated again, to Canada or Australia this time. Some grandsons had reacted against materialism, as third generations can afford to, and left the suburb to live and work in accordance with a social conscience. There was a hiatus during which the houses were inappropriate to the taste of the time; they were regarded as relics of the nouveau riche, while newer money favoured country estates with stables, outside the city: the houses would be demolished and the suburb become the site of multinational company complexes.

  But it looked as if it might be saved by the unpredicted solution of desegregation. A new generation of still newer money arrived, and these were no immigrants from another country. They were those who had always belonged, but only looked on the pillars and balconies from the hovels and township yards they were confined to. It was one of these houses that Motsamai had bought. Whether or not he admired the architecture (the parents did not have their son’s criteria for determining the worth or otherwise of people’s taste) it provided a comfortable space for a successful man and his family and was now supplied with current standard equipment, electrically-controlled gates for their security against those who remained in township yards and city squatter camps.

  The enthusiastic chatter of the television set was part of the company, its changing levels of brightness another face among them. They were gathered in one area by a natural response to the oversize of the living-room where islands of armchairs and spindly tables were grouped. Hamilton Motsamai had discarded his jacket as he shed the persona of his day spent flying back and forth to plead in the Appeal Court at Bloemfontein.—Make yourself at home, Harald!—

  A domestic bar that must have been part of the original equipment of the house was stocked with the best brands, a young man who seemed slight in contrast with the confident ebullience of his father was chivvied to offer drinks between Motsamai’s introductions to various others summoned—a brother-in-law, someone’s sister, someone else’s friend; unclear whether these were all guests or more or less living in the house. Motsamai switched angrily to his mother tongue to reproach several youngsters who were lying stomach-down on the carpet, paddling their legs in glee at the pop group performing on television, and had not risen to greet the guests.

  The wife and a daughter—so many introductions at once—had entered with bowls of potato crisps and peanuts. Motsamai’s wife was a beauty in the outmoded style, broad-bosomed, her hair straightened and re-curled in European matronly fa
shion, but the daughter was tall and slender, nature’s old dutiful emphasis on the source of nourishment, the breasts, mutated into insignificance under loose clothing, her long dreadlocks drawn away from a Nefertiti profile, the worldly-wise eyes of her father emerging in slanting assertion under painted lids, and the delicate jut of her jaw a rejection of everything that would have determined her life in the past.

  Motsamai’s wife—Lenali, that’s right—was animatedly embarrassed by the behaviour of the children.

  —Never mind, they’re enjoying themselves, let’s not interrupt them.—Hadn’t she, Claudia—oh long ago—had the same parental reaction when her own son had ignored the boring conventions of the adult world.

  —These kids are terrible. You can believe me. I don’t know what they learn at school. No respect. If you’ve had a boy, of course you know how it is, the mother can’t do anything with them and the father—well, he’s got important things on his mind, isn’t it … always! Hamilton only complains to me! I don’t know if you found it like that!—

  This woman doesn’t know what happened to the boy Claudia ‘found like that’; or rather, if she does (surely Hamilton has told her something of the story of the clients he’s brought home) she doesn’t draw attention to their plight by the pretence that their son doesn’t exist, that what he says he has done has nullified everything he once was, the way old friends feel they must do. Duncan is not taboo, tonight, here.—I used to think it was because ours is an only child, and he was too much among grownups, he showed this the only way he could, just ignoring them. Wouldn’t kiss the aunts who patted his head and asked what he wanted to be when he was big … he’d disappear to his room.—