The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  He cares. Hamilton cares, all right. You must believe that? Harald? Surely he’s shown it. To us. But the court’s not the place, not there.

  Khulu held up the paper in acknowledgment of his return. She was watching him making his way through lanes of tables.

  And that’s the other one who does. Who would have thought he’d be the one who’d know we need someone with us every day, and it turns out we’d want nobody but him.

  Claudia prescribed a sleeping pill for herself and went to bed.

  Harald alone in the living-room took out the notebook and added, in reflection, details of the trial. He did not know what the purpose of these notes was. The question was put to himself as his attention wandered and came to rest on dead flowers in a vase; the only answer was the man, Khulu’s. I don’t understand killing. He tried to find a practical purpose for the notes; if there were to be an appeal against sentence, he would want to be able to refer to the impressions he had of how evidence that led to sentence (Duncan hasn’t waited for judgment, there’s only the degree of guilt, this play on words with culpability that Hamilton Motsamai’s counting on) was received by the laconic judge, the silent assessors, the lawyers, even the clerks, your Indian and Afrikaner girls entered into a male domain, and those mannequins of the law, the policemen standing by without emanating human presence. Even the bodies pressed about Claudia and him—their reactions. Because all there are old hands, familiars of which way things are going in a trial and must know signs he and Claudia miss or cannot read.

  Or maybe what he is recording simply belongs along with what Duncan had written there and that he, Harald, has read in transgression of his own codes of behaviour. Probably it will go to the box in the cupboard where that letter the boy wrote from school has lain so long.

  The word performance keeps rising. He sees he wrote down his nadir reached: Justice is a performance. Scribbled what he has described as Hamilton’s self-promoting ‘performance’; and then Khulu Dladla’s quote from the girl—that Duncan wanted her to be ‘performing her life’ for him. He turned on the television to keep himself from going to bed unable to sleep (he refuses Claudia’s prescription of a tranquillizer or sleeping pill, she thinks—privately—that he is one of those fortunately disciplined individuals who have the subconscious instinct that there is in them something that would lead to addiction) but what was offered was just another performance, a rock group contest on one channel and a sitcom in a language he didn’t understand, on another.

  He sat on, the notebook under his hand, and turned to the radio. He had come upon the middle of one of the phone-in programmes on subjects of public preoccupation, from abortion to supermarket prices and the culling of elephants, which are the circuses provided by democracy so that those who have bread but are aware that it is not true that anybody can (as opposed to ‘may’) become president have the opportunity and recognition at least of hearing his or her own voicing of opinions and frustrations aloud to the populace. The callers are, however meandering and inarticulate (he usually switches off at once), sometimes calling up deep impulses that lie beneath conformation to the ethos of their time and place. The Death Penalty: this was what talk-show democracy was open about to these eager citizens, this night. But the Death Penalty will be abolished! In-the-know Motsamai is certain of it. It will be proved a violation of the Constitution; there is no possibility, now, that Duncan—God forbid, and He has—could have sentence of death passed on him for what he has done, whyever he did it?

  This is a civilized country now, and the State does not commit murder. But as Harald sits with his gaze fixed on the flowers that should have been thrown away he hears them, those callers for the death cell and the rope, early mornings with the hangman in Pretoria. They want, they still want, they are ready to demand over the air, for everyone, the President, the Minister of Justice, the Constitutional Court to hear—they want a corpse for a corpse, a murderer for a murderer. And they stumble indignantly through what can’t be denied: the satisfaction they feel, the only reconciliation there is for them, lies in the death of one whose act took one of their own, or whose example threatens other lives. Their voices relayed over the telephone to the studio, the patronizing check on their verbosity by the presenter—for them the Death Penalty cannot be abolished. They—the people clamouring out there beyond the townhouse complex and the prison where Duncan awaits the verdict of his trial—they will condemn him to death in their minds no matter what sentence the judge passes down upon him, no matter how many assurances of mitigation Motsamai, out of his knowledge, his cleverness, his experience gives. In the air of the country, they are calling for a referendum; they, not the Constitutional Court will have the Last Judgment on murderers like Duncan. And referendum or not, Harald hears and knows, his son and sleeping Claudia’s shall have this will to his death surrounding him as long as he lives. The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it.

  No performance; this is reality.

  She turned in her sleep and was awakened by the sense of emptiness beside her; felt for her watch. The luminous message: past two o’clock. She got up as Duncan had done and went to find the missing one. The door to the bathroom that was what the townhouse complex’s brochure called en suite with the bedroom was ajar; no-one there. The living-room was dark and mum. She went cautiously down the passage as if she thought to meet an intruder. In the second bathroom Harald was lying, asleep in the tub, his head supported on the rim but his body, to Claudia, that of a drowned man.

  Motsamai has assured his client, the accused, as well: tomorrow it will be over. And it has gone very encouragingly: he is confident. Colleagues who have been following the case say ten years, and of course there’s always remission. But he, Motsamai, he thinks he has succeeded in a manner that has a good chance of seven. And then, with remission … The best way to talk to Duncan, he knows, is to do so as if Duncan were a fellow lawyer and they were considering someone else’s case in which both were interested. That is the way, he is sensitive to, this young man in deep trouble can best manage himself; but he cannot resist repeating, indeed, as if to a colleague—Extremely well, particularly the cross examination with her.—

  They’ve all gone away to await tomorrow when it will be over for them: his mother, his father, Khulu their proxy son he sees sits beside them where he cannot be, Motsamai, the judge, the girl clerks with their hair falling over their arms as they touch the keyboards of their word-processors, the faces of the spectators of his life; gone home. Alone. His parents, his friend Khulu (he hadn’t realized, until now, how that one in the house really was his friend among the others) feel bad about leaving him behind, particularly this time, he knows, but he is relieved to have them gone.

  So Motsamai, playing father when father cannot, has saved him at the cost of her. Natalie/Nastasya. He has opened her up and exposed her, dissected her womb with a baby in it, held out for all to see her mind and motives and body whose force and contradictions a lover knew only too well. Who will put Natalie together again; no-one. Motsamai is confident; this time she has saved him.

  During the night, he did not dream in his cell but lived a fantasy while wakeful. Ten years, with remission, whatever spell of time has gone by, he comes out blinking into the sun, the city. Someone points to a child. Is it a girl, it looks like Natalie/ Nastasya. No, it’s a boy, it looks like us, Carl and Duncan.

  Motsamai is wearing a particularly well-cut suit and the close coir of his hair has been shaped, the 19th-century African chief’s wisp of chin-beard is combed to assert its mobile emphasis when he’s speaking; this is the care Harald’s business colleagues will take with their appearance on the day an important meeting is scheduled.

  Motsamai was waiting for them in the corridors where echoes of everything they have heard in court in the past days is trapped under the high ceilings. He walked them along with calm tread through the skitter of clerks and messengers and the wandering of people looking for this court or that. When he found a little sp
ace for them he stopped.—You’re all right, Claudia? I hope you had a night’s rest, Harald. Me? Oh I always sleep, when I finally do get to bed if I’m preparing myself … Ah-hêh. Today. Now look, I’ve got the Prosecutor to agree that you can see Duncan at the lunch break. You know—it’ll be after everything’s concluded this morning, I don’t expect the verdict and so forth until the afternoon. So you’ll see him. Before it’s handed down.—

  When you find yourself confronted—can’t look away, no evasion of propriety, class or privilege possible—with justice, you understand: the defenders and the prosecutors come to a reasonable settlement on the price of a murder. For Harald—that’s what’s been agreed. Motsamai’s Learned Friend, for the State, is satisfied he’s exacted all he can get. Motsamai himself—he actually makes a balancing gesture, his two hands are the scales: let well alone. —judges are touchy people. Ah-hêh. You know? They get tired like us—when you keep on going after they’ve made up their minds. There’s a stage at which … You follow me? He sits with his assessors and the verdict is there. More evidence—that’s not going to affect it. We’ve made our impression with our witnesses, our cross examination. I don’t want to disturb this with over-kill. With regard to sentence—that’s something else. (He’s using the phrase as one of the double entendre expressions in his voguish sophistication, implying not only another matter but also something exceptional.) I’ll be applying myself to that this afternoon.—

  They sit with Khulu through the summings-up. The Prosecutor and the Senior Counsel for the Defence each review with succinct force and conviction what they have already submitted on the evidence in chief, elicited, each according to his own purpose and skill, from accused and witnesses during that process and in cross examination.

  Duncan is a fanatically possessive man who jealously premeditated revenging himself, harming Carl Jespersen who had sexual intercourse with his lover, Natalie James, and, in full awareness of the situation, in purposeful behaviour, in full capability, with criminal capacity, took advantage of the availability of a gun and deliberately shot the man where he knew it would be fatal, in the head.

  Harald and Claudia and Khulu follow in common comprehension only these key terms in what comes from the samurai face the Prosecutor is wearing: criminal capacity, purposeful behaviour, full awareness. The combinations of phrases ignite as words in a column of newspaper set alight run together in flame. In a single attention, they scarcely hear the connecting sequence, the sense of the Prosecutor’s long discourse. These legalistic terms, set down in the books of reference both Defence Counsel and Prosecutor have on their tables, are what will pronounce judgment of Duncan. When it is Hamilton’s, Motsamai’s turn, the three become separate attentions again, each listening with a different silent accompaniment, out of different ideas of what Duncan is, to every word, detail, nuance in what Motsamai is saying.

  Duncan is a man totally without violent instincts, as his record of behaviour and caring for a mentally aggressive partner shows. As he well knew, there was no love affair possible between his former homosexual lover and the woman to whom he himself devoted such loving care. Therefore there was no jealous premeditation of violence or any other form of action towards the man. What he was suddenly confronted with on the night of January 18th was a shameless spectacle of crude sexual exhibitionism performed by these two people. Would not any violent man have attacked Jespersen at once? He certainly would. Duncan Lindgard did not attack Jespersen then and there, as any violent instincts undoubtedly would have led him to. All next day the shock and pain incapacitated him, he could not go to work. Scarcely believing he had seen what he had seen, he went back to the house only to look again at where it happened. Jespersen’s unexpected presence on the very sofa where the degrading spectacle had taken place, Jespersen’s incredible lack of shame, his assumption that it could just be brushed aside between men who were brothers, once even been lovers, over a drink together—this was a second terrible shock on top of the first. Equalling the force of a blow to the head, psychiatric evidence bears out, such shock has the effect of producing blankout.

  An interruption from one of the two presences, the Greek chorus of the assessors forgotten round the judge deity: the white one asks, What is that? You used that word before. You mean a blackout?

  —What is a blankout? A blankout is not a blackout, a state when the individual loses consciousness. A blankout is the state in which the individual suffers loss of self-control, a loss in which there is inability to act in accordance with appreciation of wrongfulness, a state of criminal incapacity. It was in this state that, as a result of provocation and severe emotional stress, Duncan Lindgard picked up the gun that was lying there and silenced his tormentor with a shot.—

  No-one—Harald, Claudia, Khulu—Duncan?—what was Duncan looking for in him—no-one could have any idea of the judge’s reactions from the face inclined slightly over the papers apparently being ordered under his precise hands. Perhaps (this is what Harald believes) he has, as Motsamai suggests, made up his mind on the verdict much earlier; or perhaps he is going with his two assessors who ramble behind him for the lunch adjournment like companionable dogs, to decide with them what it was that Duncan really did when he shot a man in the head. For it becomes clear to those who witness a trial that there is no such act as the simple act of murder. To kill is only the definitive act arising out of many others surrounding it, acts of spilled words, presumptions, sexual congress, and, all around these, muggings in the streets.

  Motsamai offers no experienced observations he may have made of the judge’s reception of his summing-up and that of the Prosecutor, and Harald and Claudia don’t have the sense that it is right to ask him. It would be like questioning his effectiveness; making him feel the weight of them, finally, in his hands. His demeanour is Senior Counsel Motsamai rather than Hamilton as he leads them, at last, to what they have never seen, a cell. It is not quite the cell where Duncan has been led back to as they left him after the visitors’ room, but a cell under the well of the court where prisoners are kept during the intervals of their trials.

  Corridors and steps and doors for which warders have bracelets of keys. It’s a cellar-like place and in a comer behind a knee-high wall there’s a lavatory bowl. Some wooden chairs with numbers chalked on them. There is a plate of food on the seat of one. Duncan, their son, is standing with a glass of water in his hand, he feels for somewhere to put it down, it wobbles against the plate. He embraces his mother, a hug as he always used to when he came for a meal, and then presses his father to him, the touch of his beard against Harald’s cheek and ear something unfamiliar to them both.

  Motsamai had left them alone; the presence of warders, policemen, has long ceased to count, with them.—He’s confident about this afternoon.—Claudia is the first to speak. But what does that mean, confident? Duncan’s gentle smile: it says he does not need the judge to tell him he did what he did.

  —The circumstances.—Harald can’t quite bring himself to make full reference to everything that has been done to Duncan and everything Duncan has done, but he wants to take the three of them to the safety of the concession by justice—extenuating circumstances; salvation has come down to this practical compromise from its place on High.

  —Anyway. I’m glad it will be over for you two soon. Time for you to get back to work, I’m sure. Take things up.—

  Harald doesn’t want to be pictured sitting in a board room, he’s here, for his son in a cell.—How did you feel about Motsamai, the way he handled it, was it what you expected? I couldn’t see at all what was going on with you.—

  —I left it all to him. Except when I was on the stand myself. I said what I had to say, that’s all. The rest is his work, his decisions.—

  —It’s a good thing you trusted him. There’s so much it’s difficult for people like us to understand—about the process, I mean.—

  He can’t ask their son about the real subject they can’t help circling, Motsamai’s cross examinatio
n of the girl. What might be crucial for the verdict, what Motsamai did to that girl—how does he feel about Motsamai using like this Natalie whom he loved—loves? She stayed with him because he was ‘more dreadful than the water’, it’s in the notebook—only Harald and his son know it, Harald thought from time to time in Motsamai’s chambers he ought to show him the notebook but, unknown to his son that he had stolen it, he kept it between him and his son. Now the son has had to stand by between warders and watch her destruction by a lawyer because he has, yes, done something more dreadful, far worse than her choice to drown herself, taken a life not his own to take. Because of what he came upon on the sofa that night, did he rejoice to see her subjected to Motsamai’s tactics? I left it all to him. Was there now a new solitariness, a new suffering to add to all the others that had assailed him, now it is bitterness against the man who has destroyed Natalie/Nastasya, a turning against the man in whose hands he was, no-one else can do anything for him, not even the parents who made a covenant always to be there for him? Inside Harald there cried out in anger to his God, is there no end to what my son has to bear?

  —Has Motsamai said anything to you about what you might expect?—Claudia says this because she can’t believe there really will be a verdict this afternoon and then a sentence passed next morning, the judge and his assessors will settle themselves into their chairs again and she will hear it.

  —Yes, we’ve talked. I hope he has, to you and Dad as well.—

  Harald answered.—He has. But of course, it’s only what he thinks, I mean from some precedent. All the time, no sign of what the judge was concluding about anything, even when he interrupted, asked something, or objected to something—I tried to make out whether he was impressed, disbelieving, whatever. But they’re past masters at the neutral voice and the expressionless face.—