The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  It occurs to Harald that whenever they leave the prison now it is as it was when they left him at school. The span of time ahead, unthinkable seven years or five years, is telescoped to something by which it can be understood.

  He knows that there is the unanswered question in their regard on him every time they visit; needing a response. The judge stated it as a fact, not a question. ‘He has shown no remorse.’ How could they know, any of them, what they have a word for. How could they know what they are thinking, talking about. Harald and Claudia, my poor parents, do you want your little boy to come in tears to say I’m sorry? Will it all be mended, a window I smashed with a ball? Shall I be a civilized human being again, for the one, and will God forgive and cleanse me, for the other. Is that what they think it is, this thing, remorse.

  He brought me a book when I was awaiting trial, I think it was when he was so angry, so horrified that he wanted to accuse, punish me, but there was something in it he didn’t, doesn’t, never can know. The passage about the one who did it and the one to whom it was done. ‘It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together—as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, the one acting, the other suffering him—share a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other.’

  Writers are dangerous people. How is it that a writer knows these things? Only that this time it is the three of us, alone together. In the ‘human relationship’—love-making and all the rest—Carl acted, I suffered him, I acted, Natalie suffered me, and that night on the sofa they acted and I suffered them both. We belong to each other.

  I’ve copied that quotation again and again, don’t know how many times, in the middle of the night from memory I’ve written it on a scrap of paper the way she used to scribble a line for a poem, I’ve stopped in the middle of a section, when I was concentrating on my plan, and had to write it out somewhere. He’s dead, and he and she and I share a secret that binds us forever together. You couldn’t put it better than that; he’s dead, I somehow took up the gun and shot him in the head. There’s another passage in that book; about the one who does it. ‘He has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’ When I found them like that, my deepest desire—what was it? If only I knew what it was I wanted, of what I saw was their betrayal or consummation of us three, and if because I couldn’t have whatever it was I wanted, my deepest desire was gratified when I shot my lover and her lover. He’s dead, I’m alive, rejoicing with all of them—my parents, Motsamai—that there’s no Death Penalty any more. The murderer has outlived the murdered. Try and tell this to my judges, the one in court and the ones in the townhouse. It cannot be told, only be lived, in this walled space made for it. What’s outside, what I can see from the Tantalus window when I stand on the bed—out there, after seven years (five, Motsamai promises), will it be put behind me, will the one who is dead and I not belong to each other still. I should ask an old lag that; we didn’t move in the circle of criminals, in the house and the cottage. So many things we didn’t know, never should have needed to know. The three of us, Carl, dead, Natalie and I alive, Nastasya my victim and, as Khulu says, Natalie my torturer, wherever she is, in what I’ve done we’re bound together, whether she ever knows it or not, whether or not what she has in her womb is another secret.

  The CD player is stored at the townhouse with other things. No music in these nights between these days of my seven years. The narrow aperture of the window keeps surveillance while the Judas eye in the door is shut; what disciple of functional architecture thought up specification for that lozenge of a window which divides so satisfyingly into segments made by vertical bars. The night cut in five pieces.

  No player yet there are passages I’m hearing over and over, the adagio movement from Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ and the allegretto of a Schubert impromptu. He and I used to go to concerts in that time, the L’Agulhas time. With him there was more than Brubeck and who was the other jazz man. The deceased had a collection of recordings, Penderecki and Stockhausen, too. Listening to music that is formed in your own head, is there without any agency of reproduction—how? how?—through the hours you begin to know what music is. It’s one of the ways—only one of the ways—in which order can be selected, put together, out of the original chaos. With her, I listened to this Beethoven and Schubert for my ears alone, through headphones; it’s a bit like that now. She didn’t want to listen; I see it wasn’t because she needed to be tutored in appreciation etc., by me. It was because she was in rebellion against the principle of order; in anything, everything, that’s why she never finished the poems.

  There has to be a way.

  Of course, if I were to ‘confess’ all this to Motsamai he’d get busy with grounds of remorse and maybe even succeed—he’s a wizard in his devotion to his clients—in getting an earlier remission than he’s conned me to count on. But then all this that I live would be taken away from me; I couldn’t endure, without it, this space made for it.

  The Last Judgment of the Constitutional Court has declared the Death Penalty unconstitutional. The firm and gentle tone of the Judge President has the confidence of a man who while he is conveying the ruling arrived at after several months of weighing scrupulously the findings of a bench of independent thinkers, himself has been given grace. There is a serenity in justice.

  If the decision had been for the State, once again, to have the right to take a life for a life, it would have been too late to decree that Duncan should be hanged one early morning in Pretoria. He was already secured by his sentence: seven years. Yet the news sets her visibly trembling; he takes her two hands to steady her; and himself. The ultimate sentence held off by a moratorium was the threat that it still existed; on the Statute Book, even Motsamai had said. And while it still existed it would always have been what, for their son’s act one Friday night, could have been exacted. So it is release, relief, a curious trace, like happiness; how strange that it should be possible to feel anything like this. Duncan is still where he is.

  Harald and Claudia decided to go away. On holiday. It is awkward to admit this to Duncan, in the visitors’ room. He says, About time you took a break! How long is it?

  But let’s avoid that; the last holiday was before, when there was a customary systole and diastole between work and reward. Many months have passed for him where he is and them outside.

  To the Cape.—Didn’t you once go to L’Agulhas? Would it appeal to us, you think?—

  —It’s the end of the continent—he says, in homage.

  —Or maybe Hermanus. But we’d rather like to try somewhere new.—

  Wherever it was that they did go, flew, took the car, the beckoning world was beautiful. He was in his cell and a wretched child covered his head with his arms as he slept in the streets of Cape Town beneath the eternal mountain that made you want to live, as it does, forever. What looked, from the perspective of a moving car, like the refuse dump of a city was a vast low surface of board, tin, plastic rags and people reduced to detritus under a sky gloriously feathered, a cosmic bird, cirrus gilded by light shining from billions of miles away. A splendid night shuddered thunder with lightning fleeing in all directions. The serene sea covered rotting ancient wrecks and present pollution alike with a sheen of lucent colour, and rested the breasts of gulls. You could have walked upon that water, no wonder Harald could believe it once happened.

  Signals of life, from everything, in spité of everything. The plane’s shadow a great butterfly passing over green, and crops in ear, and lilac desert. From a window, valley lights at night fluttering to attract, attract. Claudia began to have the feeling that she and Harald were waiting for some signal, the signal that would move life on, take them out of the regression in which they had taken refuge, going through the motions, their echoing voices occupying what was emptied of meaning. She tried to think of this in practical terms: perhaps they should leave the townhouse complex as it really was already, void of their life there. Perhaps they should move hou
se.

  Could any team of professionals with their packing cases and vans make such a move; and wouldn’t it all, the stored possessions that were Duncan’s from that cottage along with everything else, be delivered, unloaded, surround Harald and her in the next habitation?

  Motsamai made sure that the firm sent Duncan sections of their projects to design. He never saw the completed set of plans for which he was drawing certain vertical, horizontal and lateral projections, aspects from the North and South, East and West. But he thought sometimes how his own work was already achieved: the structure of this cell was his accomplishment, designed to the specifications of his life.

  Harald and Claudia did not move. At the beginning of summer there was a call on the answerphone when Harald, as so often, came home to the townhouse before Claudia. The voice was at once familiar: the bass African accent and casual delivery of Khulu. How’re you folks doing? I’ve been meaning to come round. But you know how time goes, anyway I hear about you from Duncan.

  Claudia did not want to return the call at that house. Harald understood: Baker might answer. He remembered the newspaper for which Khulu had said, in the talk he kept up when the three went to a café between sessions of the court, he did most of his reporting. Harald had his secretary call there several times but without success, and a message was left.

  He/she. A summons on the security monitor, on a night when they were not expecting anyone. Claudia answered, this time. Khulu announced himself. When he reached their door, both were there to meet him, there was the keen sense of a pleasure deprived in not having sought him out months ago, themselves. His heavy arms went about each in turn. Animation filled the room, while Harald fetched drinks, and Khulu catted—Claudia, you got bread or something, some fruit, I’ve been out on a story, nothing in my stomach all day!—

  Claudia had a young man for whom to put together a meal. She came back and forth with cold meat and cheese and chutney and bread, and Harald brought the fruit bowl. Khulu ate with inattentive zest while talking about the changes in ownership of newspapers with the acquisition of a group by blacks. He was proud of this; and sceptical about the advancement of his career that Claudia suggested it would mean for him; Harald lifted a hand in the gesture that came from his experience in matters of financial power, the rivalries which take place up there in board rooms when seats are vacated by one set of backsides and taken up by another. There was laughter at this uninhibited expression of understanding that the mood brought by this visitor made easy.

  But Khulu was also a messenger. When he had pushed aside the plate of banana skins and turned in the chair with the beer glass in hand, he made his delivery.

  —Duncan wants you to do something about the child. If it’s not his, it’s Carl’s. So Duncan—

  Duncan has entered the room, the townhouse. The dog, sleeping beside Harald’s chair, might even get up to greet the empty doorway.

  No-one speaks, and then Khulu takes a mouthful of beer. He shifts the bowl of fruit to make room for the glass.—So Duncan wants.—

  He/she.

  —What is it we could do.—

  Harald remembers well:—That girl won’t have anyone claim the child! What she said in court. It’s hers.—

  —Duncan doesn’t agree.—

  —What is it he wants—blood tests, Motsamai to start all that? And to what purpose? Prove the child is his and take it from the mother? Where to? To whom? If he succeeded, who’s going to take care of a child for seven years. Seven years old, five years perhaps, before he could.—

  —I don’t think Duncan means that.—

  —Then I don’t understand it at all. Where the whole idea comes from. Is he losing all sense of reality, shut away there. After all that’s happened to him, he’s gone through, to rake up this, drag another generation into it.—

  —Harald, wait.—

  —What can I say—I don’t think he means to take the kid from her. No way! Blood tests and all that. The kind of thing the Sunday press puts on the front page. You know Duncan is a thinker, he’s got his own idea about whatsit again, paternity. —

  —Who knows whether the child is even born yet. Or whether there ever was a child. I’ve had patients with her kind of history who produce phantom pregnancies. Duncan may be distressing himself for nothing.—

  —It’s here, it’s about a month old.—

  Harald sits looking at Claudia until she says as if she already knows:—What is it?—

  —A boy.—

  —So what do you think Duncan means.—Harald tries to force himself to think of this as a proposition to be put upon the table between the fruit bowl and the glass bleary with beer dregs. —Money?—

  —Not so much that, but yes, babies need things, I suppose. Some sort of back-up for her, make sure she can take proper care of it.—

  —We don’t even know where she is.—

  —I know how to find her.—

  Perhaps the girl is holed up somewhere with her baby, secret from the world, and she does not know that the men, Duncan and Khulu are after her; for Claudia, who has seen so many births, there was a moment of pure possession like that, for herself after giving birth, she had thought long forgotten.—Perhaps Duncan should leave her alone.—

  The two men misunderstand Claudia; what they hear is embittered opposition to any money, back-up, contact, being provided for that girl and her doubtful progeny.

  Khulu gently repeats the expression of Duncan’s will.—I know where to find her.—

  In the family.

  This is a matter between them, the three in the townhouse. They part that night with the intimacy of court days restored.

  Khulu Dladla has his own knowledge that this couple to whom the fact that he’s black and gay doesn’t preclude his being, to them, like a son—well, they’re white, after all, and what they’re appalled by is that they might be expected to prove themselves as parents to their own son by taking in the kid, themselves. As if—with his people—this would need a second’s thought! Children belong, never mind any doubts about their origin, in the family.

  There was no conception for a forty-seven-year-old. But there is a child.

  It is provided for through the offices of Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai’s chambers; the one condition Harald and Claudia took courage to insist, with Duncan, was that arrangements should be made by Hamilton, and not in personal contact with them. Duncan doesn’t demur, let it be as they like, he smiles as if leaving his father, fellow reader, to choose books for him, and he doesn’t offer any expression of gratitude, either. Everything is suddenly simple between them; why? Harald wonders whether he has been seeing her, Natalie/Nastasya has her visiting days at the prison? Or she’s written letters, her poems. One can’t ask. But he’s been able to come to them, his parents, with anything at all, even this matter of the child. They’re there for him.

  Perhaps in time—even five years is long—they’ll see the child; Hamilton is confident, as always: he’ll get round her just as he led her to condemn herself out of her own mouth under cross examination, he’ll arrange what he calls access. Get to know the small boy. Have him at the townhouse, watch him play with the dog.

  And Duncan?

  Duncan has been granted permission to work in the prison library as well as pursue his studies in his cell. It is not much of a library, in terms of the kind of books that he and Harald have a need to read; the works that are dangerous and indispensable, revealing to you what you are. It’s not much used. The long-term prisoners who occupy cells adjoining his are mostly men for whom life has been action not contemplation; in violence, his and theirs, is the escape from self. When you kill the other you are trying to kill the self that plagues your existence. Then only the brute remains to live on, caged: most of them are terrible, filled with mumbling hate, dangling fists clutched to strike again, such hands can’t take up these frail objects, binding and paper, that could offer them the only freedom there is, behind these walls.

  Who on earth is it
who decides what should and should not be suitable for criminals to read, presumably on the criterion that there shall be nothing to rouse the passions that have already raged and destroyed? Rehabilitation. Plenty of religious stuff; as if religion has never roused murderous passion, and is not doing so again, outside the walls. Self-improvement manuals that are seldom taken out: Teach Yourself Bookkeeping and Accountancy, systems for a life that knows no chaos. But among the paper-back stack of mysteries (why should it be considered of interest to inmates to read of fictitious killings when we’ve performed the real thing?)—among these broken open at the spine as if what was to be found in them was to be cracked like a coconut or prised like an oyster, there are some real books, God knows how they got there. Maybe when you’re let out, done your time, as we say in here, it’s the form to donate your books for someone who’s surely going to come after. I sometimes find something for myself. There’s a translation of the Odyssey with fishmoths that have given up the ghost between pages. I’ve never known this book, its exalted category along with the bible, more than at second-hand from quotations in other books; if Harald’s read it he somehow didn’t succeed in interesting me. The architecture of ancient Greece—yes of course, that was more my line as a student, and I have the usual stock of bits and pieces of mythology. Oedipus put out his eyes for his crime. That’s about all. Rut now there’s something that’s for me, that’s been waiting for me, in this place, in my time. Time to read and re-read it. ‘With that he trained a stabbing arrow on Antinous … / just lifting a gorgeous golden loving-cup in his hands,/just tilting the two-handled goblet back to his lips,/about to drain the wine —and slaughter the last thing/on the suitor’s mind: who could dream that one foe/in that crowd of feasters, however great his power,/could bring down death on him, and black doom?/But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat/and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—/and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp/as the shaft sank home.’ And there is Odysseus shouting at the other men around Penelope ‘You dogs! … /so cocksure that you … wooed my wife/behind my back while I was still alive!’