Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Why doesn’t Duncan speak.

I can’t tell you, can I? I don’t know. Perhaps because the lawyers keep battering him with ‘circumstantial evidence’ so that he can’t have any faith that the truth will count, you can’t win against circumstantial evidence, a gardener sees you crossing the grass and later the police pick up a gun. A man who doesn’t even have a watch, can’t say what time all this was. If you can’t prove your innocence, you are guilty, isn’t that what Duncan’s come to.

Why doesn’t he speak.

Well, that’s the only positive thing the man said, so far as I’m concerned. We have to try and get him to confide in the lawyer even if he won’t in you or me. And don’t ask me why he won’t.

She and he.

But what are they to do, if in his dire need, he does not need them? He, Harald, has to keep his eyes on the road, away from her, because they suddenly are deluged with tears, as if a sphincter has been pressured to bursting point. These drives. These drives back from disaster.

Harald was in the cottage. He had gone first to the room at the end of the garden where the plumber’s assistant and part-time gardener lived. A padlock on a stable door; the property was old, the man occupied what once must have housed a horse.

Harald had avoided the house, expecting to send the man to fetch the cottage key for him, although there was a car in the driveway, indicating someone was at home. When he knocked, a half-recognized face appeared at a window, and Khulu Dladla came to the door. He had met Dladla a few times — Duncan now and then had his parents over for drinks in the garden, they didn’t expect him to bother with providing a meal, and usually one or other of the friends on the property would join them. Harald had the key from Khulu; the heavy young man thumped off barefoot to fetch it; the word-processor at which he was interrupted shone an acid green eye on that living-room; that sofa. Harald was left standing alone with it. The young man’s feelings as he handed over the key to the cottage drew his features into the kind of painful frowning of one who is tightening a screw.

— I can come with you, if you want.—

No, Harald was touched by the awkward kindness that suddenly brought him together with this man but there should be no witness to the implications of Duncan’s absence from the cottage.

Harald was in the room where Duncan slept. And the girl. There was a pot of face-cream among the cigarette packs on the left bedside table. He turned away respectfully from the appearance of the room, took shirts and underpants and socks from a wallcupboard while ignoring anything else, none of his business, stacked there.

Don’t bring anything I was reading.

The books weighing a rickety bamboo table to the right of the bed; but he went over, he picked them up, read the titles familiar or unfamiliar to him, with an awareness of being watched by the empty room itself. The table had a lower shelf from which architectural journals and newspapers were sprawled to the floor. To him they had the look of having been dropped there, that day, when the occupant of the bed lay listening to battering on his door. He knelt on one knee and straightened them into place but the shelf sagged and they spilled again, and mixed up with them was a notebook of the cheap kind schoolchildren use. He balanced it on top of the pile — what for? So that Duncan would be able to put his hand on it when he came back to sleep in that bed? As if the delusion existed that he was about to do so.

He took up the notebook and opened it. He felt settle on the nape of his neck the meanness of what he was doing as he turned the pages, the betrayal of what the father had taught the son, you respect people’s privacy, you don’t read other people’s letters, you don’t read any personal matter that isn’t meant for your eyes. It was all ordinary, harmless — date when the car was last serviced, calculations of money amounts for some purpose or other, an address scored across, note of the back number of some architectural digest, not a diary but a jotter for preoccupations come to mind at odd hours. Then scrawled on the last page to have been used there was a passage copied from somewhere — Harald’s love of reading had been passed on when the boy was still a child. Harald recognized with the first few words, Dostoevsky, yes, Rogozhin speaking of Nastasya Filippovna. ‘She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not had me; that’s the truth. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water.’

During the period of awaiting trial there are no proceedings in a criminal case with which the papers may feed sensations to the public. When the first reports of the Lindgard son accused of killing a man were published, there was a tacit hush formed around the arrival of the member of the Board of Directors at his office. Newspapers were turned face-down on the headlines or removed from where his eyes and those of others might meet above them. The chairman did not know whether, in the privacy of the Board Room, there should be a formal expression of sympathy and concern for the colleague held in high regard, and his wife, in their time of trouble — that was the phrasing he would have used — or whether it was more tactful and helpful to evade any official attention, the sort of thing that would be remembered although not recorded in the minutes, a kind of conviction-once-removed, going on record against Lindgard, the biological father, at least, of a crime. It was decided to make no statement from the Board. Individual members found appropriate moments when they condoled with him briefly, to limit embarrassment on both sides. The general attitude to be adopted was to show him that of course, the whole thing was preposterous, some ghastly mistake. He thanked them, without concurring; they took this to mean simply that he did not want to talk about the ghastly mistake. Most of them had sons and daughters of their own for whom such an act would be equally impossible.

The period was dealt with on the only model within Lindgard’s and his colleagues’ experience: a remission in an illness about whose prognosis it is best not to enquire. In the men’s room one day a colleague with whom he had been a junior together and who had more concern for frankness of human feeling than about maintaining some convention of his dignity, spoke while peeing. As if it were a double relief — When there’s ever anything I can do — I’ve no idea what that might be — don’t hesitate for a moment, or for any reason. It must be hell. I never know whether to talk about it or not, Harald; how you’d feel. Whatever kind of frame-up it is — it must be agonizing to deal with, knowing it just couldn’t be, it’s out of the question.—

Lindgard had washed his hands. He was pulling the roller towel fastidiously to serve himself with a dry length. Now he spoke in this tiled enclave devoted to humble body functions.

— It isn’t out of the question.—

His colleague righted himself, stood in shock. It hadn’t been said. There are some things it’s not fair to have been told, the speaker will regret the telling the moment it has been done. He went quickly to the door and then turned and came back, put the flat of his hand on Lindgard’s shoulder-blade exactly where the son had made his gesture of communication when he met his father and mother for the first time in the visitors’ room.

Few of the doctor’s patients connected her with one of the cases of violence they might have read about. There were so many; in a region of the country where the political ambition of a leader had led to killings that had become vendettas, fomented by him, a daily tally of deaths was routine as a weather report; elsewhere, taxi drivers shot one another in rivalry over who would choose to ride with them, quarrels in discotheques were settled by the final curse-word of guns. State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way.