The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Claudia wanted to go to the visitors’ room the day before the trial began. During the morning Harald abruptly left his office, passed his secretary’s careful absorption at her computer (she knows, she knows, there’s something that emanates from people when they are about the business of their trouble); down in the lift where employees whose names they’re aware he does not recall greet the executive member of the Board as a sign of loyalty to the firm that feeds them; is saluted in the building’s basement carpark by the security guard in paramilitary uniform, and arrives unannounced at chambers. Hamilton Motsamai is in conference with another client but when his secretary—she knows, she knows the trial starts tomorrow—informs him on the intercom he excuses himself to the client and comes to Harald. Nobody’s need is greater than Harald’s; Motsamai’s hand is outstretched, his mouth still is parted with the words he was speaking when he left his office, the switch of attention from one set of people in trouble to another is in his face as a slide projector flicks one transparency away for another to drop into view. Motsamai’s face has been formed by this succession; whatever his clients pay him for, however high his fees, they leave, like initials scratched into the living bark of a tree, their anguish on the surface of his facial expression; his strength, confidence and pride wear it as a palimpsest upon him. He and Harald go into an anteroom full of files and boxes. Motsamai’s tongue moves back and forth along the teeth of his lower jaw, bulging under the membrane of the lip, his wisp of beard lifts, as he listens to Harald: no, no.—Much better if you stay away. I’ll see him, I’ll be with him this afternoon. He’s prepared himself, nothing should be allowed to disturb that. His mother, no—you know, that can only get him thinking how he’s got to face you from the dock again tomorrow. He’ll be all right. He’s fine, he’s in control.—

  Harald sits in his car. The key is in the ignition. A beggar sprawled against a shopfront is clawing bread from a half-loaf and stuffing it into his mouth. Mama traders call and argue among pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Rotting cabbage leaves adrift in the gutter; life pullulating in one way or another. People cross the windscreen as darkness overtaking light. Is Duncan afraid, the day before the trial?

  Duncan is not afraid. Nothing could be more terrifying than that Friday night.

  There is a face at the window. It’s the familiar face, the city’s face of a street boy: Harald has forgotten to give him his handout for having whistled and gestured the availability of this parkingbay when he arrived. He lowers the window. The boy has his gluesniffer’s plastic bottle half-stuffed under the neck of the garment he’s wearing, his black skin is yellowed, like a sick plant. What’s left of his intelligence darts quickly at the coin, his survival is to see at a glance if it is enough.

  The exaltation of putting a face to everything denied me.

  By both of them joined like rutting dogs on the sofa. The exaltation—so that is what violence is, street violence. I know it, I am of it, now. How it comes to you because there is nothing else.

  It comes back to me through the hours with the two psychiatrists with their carefully arranged patient faces—how difficult for us humans to concoct an expression empty of judgment: that’s idiocy, or arrogance, superhuman—but they couldn’t get it out of me. Comprehend. Not Motsamai, either. And the court will not. No-one.

  That face. His face. Bra.

  Only she knows why I could do it. It was something made possible in me by her.

  The courtroom is a present so intense it is eternity; all that has passed since that Friday night is made one in it, there is nothing conceivable after it.

  There are many to bear witness. Not in the empty stand in the well of the court; all around Harald and Claudia. A murder trial, out of the common criminal class, with a privileged son in the professions accused of murder has provided the Sunday papers with a story of a ‘love triangle’ calling up not only readers’ concupiscence but also some shallow-buried prejudices: the milieu is described as a ‘commune’, ‘a pad’ where blacks and whites, ‘gay and straight’, live together, and there have been photographs somehow got hold of—large ones of Natalie James and the reproduction of an itinerant photographer’s nightclub group in which Carl Jespersen appears with Khulu. All around: the curious, who may or may not be able to identify the parents. Within the whispering, shuffle and creak, they are not obvious among strangers; as for themselves, theirs is a single identity they now have that years of marriage never achieved. There is only this court, this time, this existence, mother/father.

  Not all in the visitors’ seats are voyeurs. There are Duncan’s friends. Some unexpected friends they did not know; what a secretive person he was—with them, his parents. A mother and daughter—women with a lot of hair who look like two versions of the same woman some years apart. Jewish probably. Duncan had Jewish and black friends Harald and Claudia did not have; he had moved on. The two women came up and gave their names. The younger version was saying, For me it’s as if it’s happening to my brother, but the elder’s voice elbowed hers out of the way, speaking in French, Nous sommes tous créatures mêlées d’amour et du mal. Tous.

  Claudia thanked them for coming; there is a form for everything, it occurs to you unbidden.

  What was that.

  Claudia fingered distractedly back through school French. Something like us being creatures mixed of love and evil, all of us. I don’t quite see what she was getting at.

  But Harald did.

  Others approached, shook the parents’ hands, but none knew what to say as that foreign woman had, whoever she was: a messenger. And the other messenger was there. He stood distressed, forever guilty as the one who had brought, a curse he could not discard like a gun, on the way, the news that Friday evening that something terrible had happened.

  Now what Hamilton had prepared them for was being enacted. Duncan was in the well of the court wearing a wide-striped shirt and red tie with grey pants and one of those outsize linen jackets young men choose these days—the nearest Motsamai will have been able to get him to wear a suit like Motsamai’s elegant own, Duncan probably didn’t own a suit. An appearance consistent with the moral world the judge and his chosen assessors occupy—the accused’s mother and father paid close attention to the outfit and what it implied about the gaunt man on his throne. An urbane judge—Hamilton had said in the hinting tone of satisfaction. Up there, the only distinguishing feature of the man in his crimson robe was round ears standing out alertly from his skull. Was the convention of dress Duncan presented something acceptable to a worldly judge who would not associate moral standards with a suit; did it matter what a man wore when whatever his clothes might say about him, he killed. The voice of a functionary—the judge’s clerk—confirms Duncan’s identity in this place, for this reason.

  —Are you Duncan Peter Lindgard?—

  —Yes.—

  —You are charged with a crime of murder, in that you wrongfully and maliciously killed, on January 19th, 1996, Carl Jespersen. How do you plead?—

  As on that Friday night in the townhouse when the messenger made his pronouncement, everything has come to a stop; held by Duncan’s profile, his presence. But the moment is broken into by Hamilton Motsamai, Senior Counsel for the Defence. He has swiftly risen.—M’Lord, in view of the nature of the accused’s defence, would M’Lord allow me to enter a plea on my client’s behalf? The plea is not guilty. The nature of the defence, M’Lord, will become apparent during my cross examination of the Prosecution’s first witness, whom my Learned Friend for the State has identified to me.—

  The judge has nodded assent.

  All about was the movement of people shifting closer to make place for more to be seated, but by now everyone has realized which couple is the parents; no-one presses up against them in the row where they sit.

  The girl materializes; the one. She was the one on the sofa with her pants down, who may be seen: the other is out of reach of anyone’s gaze, underground along with all the others who are knifed or strangled or
shot in the violence that is the city’s, the way of death. Three more were killed in rivalry between minibus taxi owners at a rank round the corner this morning. But Duncan, when he was awaiting trial, had been wrong when he thought that what happened to him would be lost in random violence and of no public interest. It is the street killings that are of no interest, happening every day.

  There she is. The one. There are women who have days when they are ugly and days when they are beautiful. It may have something to do with a number of things: digestion, stage of biological cycle, and the mood of the way they wish to present themselves. She has on her a beautiful day. Claudia was not surprised at the aspect presented; she knew, from her medical practice, how the neurotic personality likes an audience, any audience, even one that can picture her with her legs apart on the sofa. Harald saw her for the first time as Duncan must always have seen her, his definitive image, even on her ugly days; the lovely soft skin indented, the twist of a chisel on a statue, to the curl of the lip at either side of the mouth, the rosy-buffed high forehead under stringy wisps of fringe, the lazy, intense pupils of eyes within a disguise of childish turn-down at the outer corners where the thicket of lashes met, the clothes that hid and suggested her body, modest flowing skirt that slid hack and forth across the divide of her buttocks as she walked to the witness stand, cossack blouse whose gauzy amplitude fell from the Modigliani shoulders and touched upon the points of meagre breasts. She is not a beauty but she has beauty at her command. And to be looking at her is to see that the design of her face is one that can transform into something menacing. Ugly days. When she entered the well of the court it was difficult to make out whether she avoided finding Duncan; suddenly—Harald saw—from the stand she was looking straight at Duncan, perfectly still and concentrated; and would Duncan reply for her, as she drew it from him: Here I am. Would he! Harald could not see, could not see Duncan’s eyes and, wildly agitated, scarcely knew how to contain this—imagined—male empathy with his son.

  He felt an animus towards the Prosecutor the moment the man rose. It was a physical sense along his skin. The Prosecutor had the lugubrious high-arched brows and the elliptical wide mouth of the comedian that also may become the glaring face of the samurai. Wearing the endearing version of his features, he led his evidence in chief.

  —You lived, as lovers, with Duncan Lindgard?—

  —Yes.—

  —How long had this relationship existed?—

  —About a year and a half.—

  —Were you happy together?—

  She smiled, bunched lips and made an odd gesture that was the only sign of nerves evident in her—passed bent fingers lightly down the skin of her throat, as if to claw at herself.—Hardly that. Well, occasionally. Between all the other times.—

  —Why was the relationship you both had chosen not a happy one?—

  —Choose. I didn’t choose.—

  —How was that?—

  —He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.—

  —Could you explain to the court what that means?—

  —I had drowned and would have been dead if he hadn’t done it.—

  —You had got into difficulties while going for a swim?—

  —I walked out into the sea.—

  —It was your intention to drown.—

  —That’s right.—

  The assembly is thrilled by this grand laconic recklessness towards the precious possession of life itself. Harald and Claudia can feel that the people around them already have fallen in love with this girl, their faces turned on her are capitulating: Here I am.

  —Weren’t you glad to be alive, after all?—

  —He wanted me to be. That was nice.—

  —So why were you not happy, grateful?—

  —He wanted me to be glad his way, to forget why I had made my decision that time, everything I hadn’t been able to deal with, as if it had disappeared. Pumped out of my lungs with the seawater, basta, a new Natalie. According to plan. He’s an architect, that’s all he knows—making plans, a plan for somebody’s life according to his specifications. Not mine. He found careers I ought to have, even attitudes. Nothing was mine.—

  —What was your reaction?—

  —I wanted to get myself back from him.—

  —He saved you and then he proceeded to undermine you, is that it? He undermined your return to confidence? Why did you continue to cohabit in the cottage with him?—

  How is it she can be a vulnerable woman, soft-fleshed creature with those eyes whose shape has not changed with the rest of her, stayed with the innocence of childhood, and say the things she does:—I thought—I was fascinated—if I could go on living like that with him—then that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I’d have tested it out, and if I could survive … well, a kind of dare. I’ve had so many failures.—

  —So you were desperate. You had already attempted suicide and now once again you were desperate.—

  —I suppose you’d call it that.—

  —Did he understand your desperation?—

  —Oh yes. That was why he was always trying to find his solution for me. What he’ll never understand, doesn’t want to understand is that I can’t use someone else’s solutions hanging like a chain round my neck. He could only strangle me.—

  —In what some might see as his well-meaning, would you say he was possessive? Jealous?—

  —Possessive … every thought I have, every trivial action, he pored over, took to pieces.—

  —Jealous of other men—their interest in you?—

  —He was jealous of the air I breathe.—

  —What were your relations with the men at the house?—

  —They were his friends and they became mine as well. Thank heaven for them, because they didn’t take life too seriously, they were not like him and me, we could all let our hair down and have fun together. He kept me away from friends I might make for myself. They were always the wrong people for me—he decided. It wasn’t worth quarrelling about, in the end.—

  —You knew he had a homosexual affair with one of the men in the house?—

  —Oh yes, he told me everything about himself. Rut everyone had forgotten about it.—

  —On the night of January 18th, did you have sexual intercourse with one of the men? Carl Jespersen?—

  —Yes. It happened.—

  —How did it come about?—

  —Carl was someone you could talk to about anything. And he knew what Duncan was like. I used to go to him when Duncan and I had quarrelled and he had a way of, well, putting things in perspective. It’s not the end of the world.—

  —Did you have an intimate relationship with Carl Jespersen previous to that night?—

  —Good God, no. He was gay; he and David were together. He found this job for me where he worked, and that was a solution Duncan approved for me. Duncan was reassured that Carl would keep an eye on me so that I wouldn’t have anything to do with other men there. Duncan was always afraid that I’d leave. It had happened to him before; he closes his hand so tightly on what he wants that he kills it.—

  The Prosecutor paused to let her mere figure of speech find its resonance in the charge before the court: murder.

  —So the accused had no reason to be jealous of Carl Jespersen?—

  —No reason. But that’s to say—he is jealous of everything, he broods on everything connected with me, even when he himself has chosen the solution. Carl and I got along well together, we worked together every day, he could have cooked up something in his mind even over the fact that Carl was the one who smoothed things between him—Duncan—and me. Reconciled us to each other. I mean, to what Duncan is, what Duncan was doing to me.—

  —Why did your relationship as a friend with Carl Jespersen change, that night?—

  —A party developed at the house and I was enjoying myself. But Duncan again wouldn’t have it, he was sure I wouldn’t get up in time for work next morning. I didn’t know whether I really was i
n my place in an advertising agency but Duncan was always worried that I wouldn’t take it seriously. He wanted me to go back to the cottage with him. In front of other people he was pleading and arguing—humiliating me. I’d had enough that day.—

  —What had occurred that distressed you?—

  —We’d talked half the night before, started again, quarrelled when we woke up in the morning, it ended the usual way. I’d had enough.—

  —Was that the reason why you did not go back to the cottage with the accused when the party ended?—

  —Yes.—

  —You were afraid that the hostility of the accused would subject you to another night of abuse.—

  —I stayed on to help Carl clean up and to get the whole scene off my chest, talking to him about it. I couldn’t bear to go back to the cottage and be reproached all over again, for my own good. I should have taken my car and driven off, right then—anywhere—as I’ve done many other times.—

  —Was violence part of the accused’s reproaches to you, did he strike you?—

  —No. It didn’t come to that.—

  —But he threatened you?—

  —Often I knew it. Not in what he said. But in the way he was; the way he looked. He was wanting to kill me. Sometimes it came out of him like a light.—

  —You were sure he had the capacity of violence. You were afraid?—

  —I knew he couldn’t kill me, because I was the one he had taken out of the water.—

  —But you had to take refuge from him that night?—

  —I just needed something without chains. Carl made me laugh instead of crying and he comforted me. Then what we did was natural. Part of it. I have never had any comfort from Duncan. I don’t know what he brought me back to life for.—

  Again, why is Duncan not in the story?

  He is the vortex from which, flung away, around, is the court. If he cannot understand why he did what he did, there will be the explanations of others. Versions. And there is this version of what he saw from the doorway; the first time, that is. She is on trial, not he. This is the way it was for her; natural. Part of it. A mating dance for three, first he with one and the other, then those two together. She was ‘enjoying herself’, the wildness he knew so well, that was her means of exploding the self that tormented her, that ended in the water, or with the pills she was able to charm out of doctors and pharmacists. When she said he took me to a hospital, she didn’t say how many times. Enjoying herself and he was the rescue service again, needing to take her back to the cottage and give her love, loving, no matter what she did (what other comfort is there). Not drunk, no. She doesn’t need alcohol to stimulate her, going on the attack with words is all the stimulant she needs, it can keep up her excitation through the nights. So this time she doesn’t want to be ‘saved’ as she puts it, in advance. It’s his turn to be victim.