Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

She did not work within a group, colleagues who would have to form an attitude to what set her apart among them. There was only Queen, the pert beauty preoccupied with her own authority as sister-in-charge at the clinic, and in the private surgery, Mrs February — whose ancestors had been dubbed with the name of the month in which they had been bought in the slave market — sat at her receptionist’s desk with the mournful eyes of a traditional dignified guise of trouble borne, in lieu of the doctor herself taking this on. It was a delicate expression of empathy that needed no passage of clumsy words. At the clinic and in her surgery hours, the doctor was within an unchanged enclosure of her life, a safe place; people who are surrounded by encroaching danger may be precariously protected for a time in areas declared as such by those outside threat, some agency of mercy. However she had difficulty in retaining the personal interest in patients’ lives which she had always held as essential to the practice of healing. The first identification with another whose son is imprisoned soon disappears in the crowd of those who are in misfortune; once truly jostled, become one among them, there has to be a sense that if I had to listen to your trouble you would have to listen to mine.

She packed up with a food parcel the clothes Harald had brought home, re-folding them.

Why didn’t you bring pyjamas?

Young men don’t wear them, don’t you remember? There weren’t any. Don’t you remember, from when he still lived at home?

How would I know what he slept in?

Didn’t you see him walking around in shorts, underpants, in the summer often coming to breakfast like that?

Of course, and didn’t she put away the clothes that came our of the wash, arrange their order in cupboards for the men in the family, the dutiful wife and mother expected, as well, of the doctor.

I didn’t occupy my time entirely with underpants.

Seems to me there must be a lot of things. Much that we didn’t remember. Don’t remember.

I wish you’d say what you mean. It’s difficult enough … to talk, to know what we’re saying. I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to catch me out, get me to explain, because I’m his mother, I ought to know, I should know why.

And I’m his father! I ought to know!

They stayed up late as they could in order to shorten the intervening night before the visit to the prison. At random he put a cassette of a Woody Allen film into the video player. When the lugubrious face appeared, Claudia remarked that the cassette was Duncan’s, lent to them and not returned. Perhaps it was an attempt, pathetic or ironic, to assert that she remembered something, a loose end, between them and their son. They heard each other laugh at parts of the film; and then it was over, the light on the screen drew in upon itself, vanished into the succubus of darkness. In bed, they lay in that darkness. Harald put his arm over her back, round her waist, but did not take her breast in his hand; it, too, lay there, open. Harald and Claudia had not made love since the night the messenger came. It was not possible for them. It might have been good, it might have helped — after all, they had been able to laugh — but there was witness, from a prison cell, closing her body, making him impotent.

He thought under cover of darkness he might tell her what he had read on the last page of the notebook. Under cover of darkness: the place to understand, for them to understand what Dostoevsky revealed of their son, and to their son, of himself. Claudia read medical journals, she probably had never read Dostoevsky, he did not reproach her for it, in his mind; she healed while he could ensure—‘insure’—as a compensation for pain and disaster, only money, but how to expect her to be able to interpret a passage from the depths of a mind with whose workings she was totally unfamiliar.

In the darkness he could disguise the reference that was within him, as a mood of practicality, necessity; the sole action open to them was to find the next thing to do.

We’ve the right to expect her to come to us. We have to see the girl.

Harald kept the key Khulu had given him and returned to the cottage and took, in the silence of the deserted bedroom, the notebook. Read again the passage of text that his son had found — what? — so devastating, a judgment unable to escape; or was it such a confirmation of ego, of power, that he could make of it his text, flaunt it, live by it. Act on it.

Harald went again through the pages. There were a few lines he had missed the first time, among banal jottings; another quotation but nothing he could put a name to. It was scribbled in overlapping large script, the kind of result of something remembered and written by feel, in the dark, half-awake. ‘I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.’ There was a dash, the initial ‘N’. A piece of adolescent self-dramatization probably divided into the broken lines of blank verse in the original, and hardly in a class to be appreciated along with Dostoevsky. He took the notebook to his office and locked it in a drawer of his desk; it was confidential, between him and his son as the two lovers of literature in the family, in their knowledge that the terrible genius of literature can give licence. His son did not know of this confidentiality. He did not know that his father had sneaked into his adult privacy and stolen his cryptic quotes with the intention of deciphering him.

Hamilton Motsamai was already in contact with the girl — of course. He stretched behind his desk and turned a gleaming yawn into a smile, in tolerance of the ignorance of lay people of how lawyers have to think ahead of them. — We don’t know this lady. You met her a few times? She has not put herself in a very good light, in view of her behaviour that night. There will be a certain reluctance I anticipate … ah-hêh … (he paddled the air with spread hands) to bring her little performance on the sofa out in court, that we’re aware of. So I’m not disturbed at all that the Deputy Attorney General has put her on the list for prosecution witness. That means I can cross examine her. You follow? — I couldn’t do that if I were to call her as a defence witness. But I’ve also made a request to the prosecutor which hasn’t been refused. He’s allowing me access — I can have her. Permission to bring her here to talk. Seems for the moment he’s undecided whether he’s going to use her or not, but I’m sure he will, in the end. He will. So he’ll recall permission after I’ve seen her, but that’s okay, that’s fine. To cover her own hanky-panky she may try some damaging character allegations about Duncan that would be useful to the prosecution. But I expect to have all I’ll need from her for when I get her on the witness stand. A lot depends on her attitude to your son. Is she still attached to him? Or is there some bad feeling, resentment towards him, so she’ll try to make herself look blameless — never mind the sofa — in any provocation that led him to this act. What about her character. All we have is her name, Natalie James, she has worked at an institute for market research, she’s been a hostess on a cruise ship to the Greek islands, she was at one time secretary to a university professor somewhere, and now she describes herself as ‘free lance’, I don’t know in what. What field. She also writes poems. I have informed her you want to see her. She says she will only meet you here, with me. Not at your place.—

Claudia keeps herself turned away while Motsamai speaks, it’s as if she would shut her eyes to concentrate best on what he is saying.

— Have you talked to Duncan about her?—