The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Now it’s taken up again, good, it’s about the young man they’ve been able to study, face, gestures (what the judge called his ‘manner’) on the witness stand. It’s about a murderer.

  —Both State and Defence psychiatrists find that the accused’s intellect is within high limits, his judgment sound. He is a young professional man of good family, apparently with a promising career ahead of him. There is no basis on which to question the Defence’s submission that everything in the accused’s behaviour as an adult has been contrary to the performance of any violent act. The evidence of a member of the common household, Nkululeko Dladla, states of the accused ‘It is not in his nature to kill.’—

  And there he is, that Dladla, sitting with the murderer’s parents, right here. People turning to look at him: it is as if he himself has spoken, a hefty black man who wears like campaign medals the insignia of the gay, his tryst rings and necklaces. Harald and Claudia are moved by the judge’s quotation of Khulu and are graced to be identified in the focus of attention that has reached him; under it Khulu is rubbing his fist back and forth across his jaw-line as he often does, they’ve noticed, when he wants to emphasize something he has said in his calm way.

  Ah but listen to this, Harald and Claudia are saying simultaneously, without words, to one another, as the judge’s narrative takes another unexpected turn, listen to this!

  —Indeed, demonstrably, it has been in his nature to succour. The accused met Natalie when she had made a suicide attempt, and, on her own admittance, brought her back to life. After they commenced to live together as lovers, he saved her again from suicide. Although he was passionately in love with her, that the relationship was not a happy one is confirmed not only by Natalie herself, but by Dladla. It seems she was not grateful to the accused for saving her life. Asked why the relationship she and the accused had chosen was not happy, she replied in evidence ‘He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.’ Her attitude towards him as revealed under cross examination by the Defence was resentful, giving credence to Dladla’s statement that although the accused ‘was patient with her … like a sick person … she gave him hell.’ She taunted him before other members of the common household. The indifference, if not defiance, with which she told the court that the child she is expecting might he either the deceased’s or the accused’s appears to be a particularly malicious example of taunting the man who loves her and is on trial for a crime passionnel of which her action is half, if not the whole cause.—

  A judge knows everything. He’s the vicar of the god of justice, as the priest is the vicar of God, he’s privy to the confessional of the court, where witnesses and experts and the accused tell what Harald and Claudia would never have learnt. This knowledge, it’s the basis of justice, isn’t it? To know all is to forgive all?—no, that’s fallacious. The man’s dead, shot in the head. He’s here under the ground of the city where this court is the seat of justice. But to know all: the judge is not going to follow, is he, any pressure for society’s angry retribution, society being represented by the State; he’s concerned with the fate of the individual as well. Motsamai must be thinking—what? Hope: it can’t be repressed. Duncan; but it’s somehow an intrusion to wonder what he’s thinking, feeling. As if the sacrificial victim is anointed in his extremis, and removed from the contagion of human contact which he pursued to its awesome finality, the taking of another’s life. But hope. Can it reach their son, from them.

  —Unfortunately, it is not within the competence of this court to refer a witness for psychiatric examination.—And now the judge has allowed himself the indulgence of sarcasm, again an aside for those who may appreciate it.

  Somebody stifles a rough laugh. It is out of order but probably what the judge expected he might get from the public.

  —Therefore it is difficult to assess what the Defence submits, that the extent of stress this young woman was capable of imposing on her patient and devoted lover was great enough to culminate in his committing a crime in a state of criminal incapacity. There is evidence that Natalie had had other passing sexual adventures during the period in which she lived with the accused as his lover, and he had forgiven or at least tolerated these. Why then if he were not to have been reduced by her, finally, to a state where he was not responsible for his actions, would he not have forgiven, tolerated her betrayal once again?

  We must turn now to the special circumstances of this particular sexual adventure. The court has learned from the accused himself that what he came upon that night after the party not only was his lover, Natalie, engaged in sexual intercourse with another man, that man was Carl Jespersen, a homosexual who had himself taken the accused as a lover and then discarded him, and who had repeatedly declared himself revulsed by women’s sexuality. The accused has not confided to the court what his emotions are towards his present and former lovers, what interpretation he puts on a role in the spectacle apparently inconceivable for him to believe Jespersen would ever force himself to perform. It is the Defence psychiatrist’s opinion that ‘When he (the accused) saw her in the sexual act with his former male lover, he felt himself emasculated by them both.’—

  Silence is a great hand spread over the court.

  All at once the people on the public benches are no longer strangers, their prurience is stifled as the laugh was, their presence is protective around the parents of this man.

  —The court can accept that it was ‘not in his nature to kill’.

  But what the accused saw in that act, and what he encountered in the deceased’s attitude next evening were surely not in the nature of human relationships in even the freest of sexual mores. Given these exceptional circumstances of what might otherwise have been nothing more than another regrettable incident in a relationship fraught with problems, the State psychiatrist submits that if the accused were to have acted in a state of diminished capacity, unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behaviour, he would have attacked the deceased then and there, on the night when he discovered the couple. The psychiatrist’s opinion is that the accused went to the house next evening with the conscious intention of vengeful jealousy built up during a day of solitary premeditation in the cottage. Asked whether she meant the accused intended to kill Jespersen, the psychiatrist’s reply was that she was not able to say to what extreme the accused’s intention might carry him.

  This brings to the court’s attention the question of the gun kept at hand in the house: did the accused have in mind, in conscious intention, the availability of the gun, which he admits having seen being produced in the living-room the previous night?—

  The judge looks up conversationally, but his audience is transfixed.

  —The psychiatrist called by the Defence found the accused to have been precipitated into a state of dissociation from what he was doing when he was confronted with the sight of Jespersen on the evening of 19th January. He submits that when the deceased said ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink’ this attitude constituted a second blow like the one received the previous night. His professional opinion was that ‘A tremendous emotional blow is as forceful as any external blow to the head.’ Further, he states: ‘With the impact of these last words he (the accused) recalls Jespersen saying, he would have entered a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated … cumulative provocation reaching its climax in the subject’s total loss of control.’

  This raised again the question of the nature and extent of cumulative provocation acceptable as the extreme stress submitted by the Defence as justification for a temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity. The psychiatrist testified that—I quote—the accused ‘is a man with a bisexual nature. That in itself is a source of personality conflict. He had suffered emotional distress when he . followed his homoerotic instincts and had a love affair which his partner, Jespersen, did not take seriously and broke off at whim. He overcame the unhappiness of the rejection and turned to the other and probably dominant side of his nature, a heterosexual alliance for whi
ch, again, he took on serious responsibility. Even more so, since the alliance was with an obviously neurotic personality with complex self-destructive tendencies for which, when crossed in what she saw as her right to pursue them, she punished him with denigration and mental aggression.’ The conclusion of this assessment, which I have already quoted earlier, was that when the accused saw her in the sexual act with his former lover, he felt himself emasculated by both.—

  Claudia feels Khulu lift and let fall his arms. At her other side, Harald’s profile is Duncan’s, the order of resemblance reversed; confusion engulfs her. She is confronted with the face of a patient whom she referred for surgery to take place today; it’s a fragment of the medical record that is her life, blown across her mind. My assessors and I, what is the voice saying—

  —My assessors and I, of course, have to examine the evidence of psychiatrists carefully and give it due weight. However, as the highest court of the land has said, their science is not an absolute but an empirical one. Psychiatrists rely on what they have been told by the accused, often without critically analyzing these statements to determine whether they may not be proffered as self-serving. My assessors and I are equally capable of interpreting the evidence as a whole, led before us, as to whether or not there was criminal responsibility. Albeit that the Defence psychiatrist is of the opinion that there was no criminal responsibility, and even though the State psychiatrist, if somewhat reluctantly, has made some concessions in terms of our law, we are entitled to come to our own conclusions. We find as a fact that the accused’s personal history of prolonged emotional stress is genuine; but is this enough?—

  So confidently in control of their life, Claudia’s and his own. First they were ceded into the hands of Motsamai; now in the power of this man who asks, but is this enough? The power’s omnipotent. Only Duncan could answer.

  —We have identified the decisive aspects of the case.

  One: did premeditation of revenge occupy the accused during the day he spent alone in the cottage, and as a consequence did he go to the house intending to seek out Jespersen and cause him bodily harm?

  Two: whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun and shot Jespersen, was he in a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated and there was total loss of control?

  On the matter of Question One, my learned assessor, Mr Abrahamse, a member of the Bar, and I are of the opinion that there was no premeditation of vengeful bodily harm, this based on the absence of dissimulation in the accused’s evidence and the fact that, firstly, it is accepted that he had no weapon of any kind with him when he left the cottage; secondly, although the house gun was not kept locked away in security, merely in a drawer in a bedroom, it is reasonable to suppose that when the room had been tidied up after the party it would not have been left lying on the table. My learned assessor, Mr Conroy, an experienced senior magistrate, was of the minority opinion that there was premeditation, this based on the reasonable assumption that solitary self incarceration in the cottage strongly implied this.

  In the matter of Question Two, the court has devoted much careful deliberation to the contrary elements revealed between the only witness to the crime itself available—that of the accused himself, and the fact of the body of the victim—and the various interpretations of his act as presented to the court. The accused has testified that he did not see the gun when he entered the living-room, and he could not say at what point he saw it. Yet he admits that he could and did pick it up. He says that he ‘didn’t make any decision’; but, nevertheless, he fired it.—

  The lifted gaze accuses them, the mother and father and friend of the murderer, although the judge probably doesn’t even know where they are among the faces; they take that gaze upon themselves.

  —There is some doubt as to whether or not he knew it was loaded. If he did not know—although it is reasonable to suppose he did, since at the party he could have seen this demonstrated—and he had to verify whether or not it was loaded by opening the chamber, the deceased surely would have had sufficient warning of the accused’s intent and could have made a move, jumped up to defend himself. The validity of the submission that one may verify that a gun is loaded or not, whether the safety catch is on or not, and then take aim accurately at a victim’s head, if one is not an experienced marksman and is in a state of inability to engage in purposeful conduct, which is one of the definitions of lack of criminal capacity, therefore also remains in some doubt. The accused has admitted that the gun, which he knew how to use, was nevertheless ‘the only one I’d ever touched’. Usage which is not habitual generally requires conscious attention in order to be performed, however simple the process may be.—

  The protection closed in around them has been withdrawn; the company have become spectators again, impatiently bored with all this legal yes and no and maybe and nevertheless. The import carried in the judge’s next statement, carefully delivered without any of the histrionic ring that has sounded an alert in some of his other pronouncements, satisfies no expectations.

  —Therefore it is the opinion of the assessors and myself that, although the crime was committed under extreme stress, it was a conscious act for which the accused bears criminal responsibility. —

  Even Harald and Claudia, who have been balancing, in that intense concentration of theirs, the yes and no of convoluted discourse—O, if one could be sufficiently removed, safe enough from it to be bored—a moment of bewilderment passes between them before they translate the dry statement of reasoned opinion into the fallen hammer of verdict. Why go on, why is he going on, he’s already picked up his weapon to hand and struck with it, full in the breast. Criminal responsibility. Our son is not mad. Duncan do you hear, did you take it in?

  But the man is going on. He taunts, he can’t leave alone what he has said, he has to do it again. Dangle hope.

  —The court takes into full consideration certain mitigating factors, albeit that the accused has shown no remorse for his crime. Firstly, he did not carry any weapon when he went to the house. Secondly, he could not have known that the deceased would be lying on the very sofa where the sexual act had taken place before his eyes the previous night. Thirdly, the gun happened to be there, on the table. If it had not been there, the accused might have abused the deceased verbally, perhaps even punched him in the usual revenge of dishonoured lovers of one kind … or both.—

  He seems now to abandon his text, to accuse the assembly and himself, the streets and suburbs and squatter camps outside the courts and the corridors, the mob of which he sees all as part, close up against the breached palace of justice.—But that is the tragedy of our present time, a tragedy repeated daily, nightly, in this city, in our country. Part of the furnishings in homes, carried in pockets along with car keys, even in the school-bags of children, constantly ready to hand in situations which lead to tragedy, the guns happen to be there.—

  Khulu is jerking his head vehemently against self-restraint, but for Harald, the judiciary has had its little homily, yes. Does this have any bearing on what is going to be done with my son who, like everyone else, breathed violence along with cigarette smoke?

  The judge takes command of himself.

  —The gun was there. The accused had the volition to use it to deadly purpose.

  The unanimous verdict of the court is that Duncan Peter Lindgard is found guilty, with extenuating circumstances, of the murder of Carl Jespersen.

  I propose to adjourn the matter of sentence until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.—

  The people have seen justice done. They are shamed, now, to be curious observers of the couple to whom something terrible has happened; they stand back, nudge each other out of the way to let Harald and Claudia and that black gay, that moffie—the witness, pass. Claudia’s eyes meet those of a stranger; he lowers his gaze.

  An emotional shock has the force of a blow on the head. But this verdict is not a shock; it is the delivery of dread that has been held—only jus
t—at bay for many weeks and has been drawing closer and closer for the days in this place, closer than the surrounding strangers; waiting to be brought down upon them, Harald and Claudia. In the movement of police, lawyers, clerks, gathering the documentation by which justice has been arrived, it is difficult to find Duncan. He’s not there? Duncan was never in this place, never. None of this could have happened to their son.

  At ten o’clock in the morning the court rises for the judge’s entry. Papers glide one under the other; the sunlight from the eastern windows shines through the membrane of his prominent ears. He is an ikon to displace those to whom Harald has directed prayer in the past.

  Apparently it is standard procedure for the Prosecutor and the Defence Counsel to joust briefly on the issue of sentence, as if it were not already determined on the papers under the judge’s hands lying half-open like mouths ready to speak what is held behind his lips locked at the corners. The Prosecutor earnestly reiterates what he has elicited from the accused in his cross examination; there can be no question of ambiguity when the facts of the case come out of the accused’s indictment of himself.—You remarked in judgment, Your Lordship, that he showed no remorse; now, further, a man who shows no remorse is also showing that whether or not he performed the act of murder consciously, it was the carrying out of an act that he would have wished to have come about. He has no regrets because the death of the man who spurned him as a lover and then was his woman’s lover is what he wanted and it is accomplished. The accused who does not defend himself is the individual who therefore accepts that his crime is his crime, there is no mitigation to be claimed for it. To expect mitigation of sentence further than the concession of extenuating circumstances the court has already granted, is to bring into question what example, what message, our courts of law would send to society with such mitigation. Your Lordship has referred to the climate of violence in our country as a cause of great concern. A crime arising out of the cohabitation of people like the accused and his fellow occupants, his mates, in a house where none of the acceptable standards of order, whether in sexual relations or the proper care of a weapon, was maintained—if such a crime is to be regarded leniently, lightly, what kind of dangerous tolerance will this indicate of what is threatening the security and decency in human relations on which our new dispensation in this country is based? Yes, the gun was there; the crime of vengeful jealousy with which it was committed is by no means excused by, but belongs along with the hijacks, rapes, robberies that arise out of the misuse of freedom by making your own rules. That’s where it all begins—defying all moral standards and claiming total permissiveness, as the accused and his friends have done, and which led to permit the murder of one of them, one of the bed-mates, by another—the accused. I don’t have to remind the court that justice must be done to society as well as to the individual accused when sentence is passed commensurate with the damage he has done in taking the life of an individual, and to society—he, a highly privileged young man, a professional to whom society has given all advantages—by taking part in the moral free-for-all that abuses and threatens that society.—