Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Their son — in his new persona, there he is, wearing one of the shirts his father fetched from the cottage, their son who has killed a man — he is not calmly observing them as he did during the previous prison visits when they could represent to him the fantasy their presence posited that he had not done what he did, someone else would be found who had tossed the gun into a fern-bed. He is distrait, restless of hands and eyes. She even asks if he has a fever? — all she knows about, poor loving mother, poor thing.

What could she prescribe for this kind of fever.

— Motsamai’s a bit of a pompous old bastard, but he’s all right. I get on with him. So you’ve been with him. You know what there is to know.—

— No. We don’t know what there is to know. Only your decision. And that he accepts it. Can’t offer an alternative. Duncan.—

Abruptly Duncan puts out a hand, the hand of a drowning man signalling from his own fathoms, and grasps his father’s across the table. His gaze falters between Harald and Claudia. — I would have understood if you two hadn’t come again, now.—

The nearest Duncan goes to admitting what he has done to them.

It is not only the man on the sofa who is his victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in him. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that where the answer — Why? Why? — is to be found? Harald is prompted by the Jesuits, Claudia by Freud.

There is a need to re-conceive, re-gestate the son.

There was good sport at his making, that Harald knows. The transformation of self in the first sexual love is something hard to recall in its thrilling freshness — it’s not only the hymen that’s broken, the chrysalis where the wings of emotion and identification with all living creatures are folded, is split for release. Harald was Claudia’s first lover when she was the youngest medical student in her class and he was in a state of indecision whether or not to leave the faculty of engineering for that of economics. Swaggering confidence of being in love gave him courage to disappoint his father and desert a tradition of engineers reaching back to the great-grandfather who emigrated from Norway.

Claudia’s father was a cardiologist and her childhood games were playing doctor with an old stethoscope; she disappointed no-one, since her mother was a school teacher whose nascent feminism wanted a more ambitious career for her daughter.

Harald and his girl, Claudia and her boy (that was how their parents thought of them, in the Sixties) were lovers too young to marry but did so when she found herself pregnant. Sport at his making. What was so enthralling about the mating, what was the compulsive attraction of the partner is something that not only changes perspective from the view of what is revealed about one another as each becomes known over years, but also reveals something else, that was there at the time, to be seen, and wasn’t. Claudia, so young, even then satisfied that healing the body fulfilled herself and all possible human obligations — a destiny, if you wanted to use outdated highfalutin terms. Harald, unable to commit himself to any such self-definition, choosing an occupation that interested him for its influence over his own existence, already picking away at meanings of life like layers of old paint. Neither was attracted to join the chanting flower-children of the era. Making love, making love was exclusive and serious — hopeless to understand now what it meant to them then — how could they have at the same time kept aware of the oddness that mismatched them even while their bodies matched in joyous revelation. And they had overcome, too — no, managed — these incompatibilities through the different stages, in marriage, of loving one another as distinct from being in love — incompatibilities which were ignored at the moment of conception: but present. The son was born of them.

The wriggle of a sperm and its reception by the ovum — what comes together in conception is what parents are, and their two streams of ancestry. But you could go back to Adam and Eve for clues in pursuit of that. Hamilton Motsamai, to whom their son’s life is entrusted — and theirs — can no doubt trace his through a language spoken, through oral legend, song and ceremony lived on the same natal earth. For those whose ancestors went out from their own to conquer, or quit their own because of persecution and poverty, ancestry begins with grandfathers who emigrated. There is an Old Country and a New Country; the heredity of the one who is conceived there begins with the New Country, the mongrel cross-patterns that have come about. The Norwegian grandfather was a Protestant but Harald’s father, Peter, mated with a Catholic whose antecedents were Irish, which is how Harald comes to have a Scandinavian first name but was brought up — his mother’s duty to do so, according to her faith — as a Catholic. Claudia’s parents had been to Scotland only once, on a European holiday, but her father, the doctor whose disciple she was, was named for a Scottish grandfather who emigrated on a forgotten date, and so Claudia’s son has received the genetically coded name Duncan Peter Lindgard.

A fish-hook in his finger.

When did certain things enter, work their way in to join the inherited, couldn’t be removed?

He did more with his father, shared more activities. She supposes that is natural, when the child is male. So there is a particular responsibility on the father. His father had him with him, fishing, and the fish-hook was embedded in the soft pad of his third finger, he was perhaps six years old. Or less. He was brought home to his mother the doctor so that she could gently remove the hook as she had the skill to do, hurting him as little as possible, an early example to him. The human body must not be wilfully damaged.

As a child he had the perfect balance of a bird on the topmost frond of a tree.

The image came to Harald from the times he took him birdwatching. She would make excuses not to come, too slow for her, the extended waiting for something to alight, sweeping the empty sky for a cut-out shape to pass across binoculars — the boy importantly looking up the appropriate illustration in the bird manual even when he was still too young to read the text. An image drew close, from time, as the lenses of binoculars do from distance: sunlight fingering the spindly forest (where, what year) and his figure striped with it, like a small animal himself as he moved carefully, not to be a disturbance to any creature in nature; such a respect for life.

When a dog had to be put down — alone, how could she not re-examine this, she was the one who had to do it because he begged her not to let the task be left to the vet. He was ten or eleven, he wanted his doctor mother to do it because he trusted her not to inflict pain, to ‘put to sleep’ (he was protected from killing by the euphemistic phrase) the pet who, while he was growing taller and stronger, had grown too old to walk. She did it without delay because of his painful, almost adult indecision about taking the old animal’s life; and after, in his subdued face, there was his conscience over their having done so, reproachful of her for having been his accomplice; adults should know how to make creatures live forever, abolish death.

This sentimental searching back to what he was is something each, Harald and Claudia, is alert to in the other, not because each seeks the weakness of comfort from the other, but because something vulnerable, incriminating to either, might be revealed. Someone must be to blame. If Duncan says he’s guilty. Sometimes, the hint of a search slips out: while they are taking the dog for a walk (they decided to defy the ruling against animals in the townhouse complex, least they could do, for their son) she remarks suddenly on the way the child would express himself, particularly when he was intrigued by what he had just learnt. Paper is trees, rain is the water that comes up from the earth when the sun heats it. So everything is something else. And tears? When I cry?