Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

I don’t remember he ever had much reason to cry. A happy kid. Never what you’d call punished.

She saw him when his face went into the scarlet paroxysm, white round the mouth, of childhood.

Because that was always left to me.

So you caused the tears.

To answer back was to engage. She let the dog on his leash tug her forward. Both parents were concerned with the preservation of life. Even he, in a manner, assuring that people (at a profit, yes; but she also was paid for most of her services, wasn’t she) would be compensated for misfortunes that befell them, and, lately, providing money for the homeless to house themselves. The army — the army. That was where the life-ethic the son had absorbed from his parents was reversed. When he did his army service he was taught to kill; whether disguised as parade ground drill, field manoeuvres, ballistics courses (the calibre of the gun found in the bed of fern has been established), what was being given was licence to cause death. That there are circumstances in which this is justified by the law of both man and God — though God’s supposed sanction might not have worked its way in, for Duncan, because although Harald had made him a reader, had he succeeded in making him a believer?

War, the right to take life: a truism.

If Harald brings it up, he also tramps it out of relevance under their feet.

Did he really see action? We know he didn’t, we thanked God he didn’t.

You said to him the army was going to be a brutalizing experience.

All right. The alternative we could have taken? You didn’t want us to send him away, did you? Out of the country. A brutalizing experience, a moral mess: but millions have resolved it. He only fired at targets.

He told us they were in the shape of human beings.

Something terrible happened.

Dear Mum and Dad,

A terrible thing happened. It was on Saturday, we were playing football, 2nd team, the one I’m in. A kid from junior school went into the gym to fetch something and suddenly there was screaming, we even heard it on the field. He saw someone hanging from the beam where the punch bag is. It was Robertse in Form 5. He was hanging by the neck. Old McLeod and the other masters went in but we were kept away. But we saw them bring out something carried in a blanket. There was an ambulance and the police. But we were told we must stay in our cubicles or the common room.

The second page of the letter is lost, although she must have kept the letter as something whose validity was meant to outlast schooldays, boyhood. It was among documentation of the protection parents provide for a child, the commitments they assume, for him. Boosters for polio inoculation, record of orthodontic treatment, anti-tetanus and hepatitis inoculations as precautions taken when he went on some school camping trip in Zimbabwe. This letter came back to her, now, she went to look for it among these other bits of paper which, perhaps, there was really no reason to keep.

When Claudia and Harald received that letter they had been strangely disturbed; she saw, now, that this was the forgotten other time, first time, they were invaded by a happening that had no place in their kind of life, the kind of life they believed they had ensured for their son. (A liberal education — whose liberalism did not extend to admitting blacks, like Motsamai, they realized now.) What could it be that led a schoolboy, a companion of their own son, protected in the same environment, the same carefully limited experience, the same selective civilized mores — they would not have confided Duncan to any school that practised corporal punishment — what could it be that brought a boy to put a rope round his neck? The contemplation was horror — once removed, that’s all. The unease they felt came from revealed knowledge that there are dangers, inherent, there in the young; dangers within existence itself. There is no segregation from them. And no-one can know, for another, even your own child, what these destructives, these primal despairs and drives are. Harald and Claudia — they could have been the boy’s parents, they were their clones, paying the same school fees, approving the enlightened educational philosophy of the worldly teaching staff, choosing a coeducational school so that a male child without sisters should mingle naturally with the other sex. What came to them was fear — fear that there could be threats to their son about which they could not know, could do nothing. They wrote to him — she wrote? — or they went to see him. She heard herself saying to Harald, I want you to tell Duncan, whatever happens to him, whatever he has done, no matter what, he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. We’re always there for you. Always . And so they could feel Duncan was safe. They had made him so.

D’you remember that time with the Robertse boy, what you told Duncan.

I remember you telling him, we got permission to take him out to lunch. We were in a garden restaurant somewhere — there was nowhere else to go. Didn’t seem the right place. Anyway.

No, no, we’d gone over the whole thing, decided we must say something to him he wouldn’t forget, and you were the one.

Why should it have been me? It came from his mother, that would be the obvious way.

Because you’re the man and he was the boy. Perhaps the idea that you would have — I don’t know — some kind of shared male experience, something likely to happen, I wouldn’t have.

What did it matter who uttered the pledge to the boy; it was made by both. It was the document produced when he said in the prison visiting room, I would have understood if you two hadn’t come back again.

When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?

Harald’s dependence on books became exactly that, in the pathological sense: the substance of writers’ imaginative explanations of human mystery made it possible for him, reading late into the night, to get up in the morning and present himself to the Board Room. He turned to old books, re-read them; the mise en scène of their time would remove him from the present in which his son was awaiting trial for murder. But like his son, he came upon his own passages, to be omnipresent in him if not to be copied out alongside the others in the notebook locked up in his office. “‘ … the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in’ slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

‘Deepest desire?’

‘Deepest desire.’

‘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.’”

Thomas Mann’s Naphta spoke to Harald in the silences that accompanied him everywhere: the accusatory silences, protectively hostile, between him and his wife; the silences he occupied even while he drew attention to anomalies in decisions being considered at business meetings or discussed the effect of new fiscal policies on the financing of mortgage bonds; susurration in the mind like a singing in the ears. The off-hand manner of the girl, at the lawyer’s chambers, when Motsamai said, You were afraid of him; and then — almost a boast — He was afraid of me. Afraid of each other? — in what is fearful, surely there is always one who menaces and one who fears. How can menace be equalled? In deadlock; and that is exactly what it will be, deadly; so if it had been Natalie/ Nastasya his son had killed there would have been an answer: they belong to each other. The reverse side of the conception of sexual love that romantically defines it as the blissful state of union, to which that good old-style marriage ceremony gives God’s blessing as one flesh. But he didn’t harm her; it was the man who lay, shot in the head, on the sofa, and it was known to the friends, to the lawyer, apparently to everyone, that he was not the first or the only other man she’d lain back on a sofa for, any one of them could have served as victim of the lover with whom she belonged in the intimacy of menace. There were times when Harald had the impulse to seek out the girl again, but Motsamai, who knew where to find her, discouraged this.