Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— I can’t afford to get her back up in any way, y’know what I mean, Harald, she feels that you and your wife blame her—

— How could we blame her. He did what he did.—

— Because you must blame someone. Your son in trouble. It’s human nature, nê? Because I must blame someone! His Counsel must prove circumstances that are causal, that will spread the guilt so that the burden of it rests on others who will never be arraigned.—

In the surf of silence that is with him, here in the familiar room where innocence and guilt are annotated by paper slips in tomes — this chamber and the prison visitors’ room are extensions of his townhouse now — Harald knows: us. On us. Harald and Claudia, who made him: the birds and the bees, don’t steal another’s toy, never read other people’s letters, thou shalt not kill.

— I have a very special kind of approach to her. Oh yes. Ah-hêh. — Motsamai’s lips struggle with something like amusement and self-approbation. — With women, you know; they’re very shrewd. And she, she turns on the charm — like a tap! — when she feels she’s being cornered. I have to coax her, without her realizing it, to condemn herself while she thinks she’s telling me about him. You have to know how to deal with such women. One moment they’re poor little victims, the next they’re showing off how they can dominate anyone and any situation. The weaker sex, they give us lawyers a lot of trouble. I can tell you.—

Harald’s distaste for the assumption that he will share, as an aside casually confidential among males, a patronizing generalization about women, is something he has to dismiss. It doesn’t matter, now, what this man thinks about anything except the case he says he is defending. Prejudices seem unimportant. Duncan was taught not to be prejudiced against blacks, Jews, Indians, Afrikaners, believers, non-believers, all the easy sins that presented themselves in the country of his birth.

— What did she tell you.—

— Don’t take this too seriously — from her. She says he is a spoilt brat. Her words. A spoilt brat. She also uses big words, nê: ‘over-protected’, so that he’s not used to any opposition, anything that threatens his will, the way he thinks things ought to go. The rules are his rules — I questioned this, I suggested that the kind of set-up these young people have has no rules except perhaps the most basic ones, you know, who has the right to take the beer out of the fridge — and of course they had the black man Petrus Ntuli to do the dirty work for them. No, she says, his rules were made for himself, it didn’t mean they were the kind of conventional rules someone like me, a lawyer, would think of. Then what were they? Well, they were about who went with whom, and so on. Sex, I gather; but also friendship, she insisted, the set living on that property seem to have complicated friendships, what you’d call loyalties. He ‘went along’ with the way everyone lived on the property, he thought this coincided with his ideas, his rules, if you prefer, but at the same time he was the ‘spoilt brat’ who couldn’t tolerate it when this style — which he’d taken on for his own, mind you — came into conflict with the other rules he’d freed himself from. From the older generation. Yours. She says these were still there in him although he believed they were not. She said something: he’s in prison now, but he was never free. And of course she means she’s free.—

— That doesn’t say much of what happened between them. From what you tell me, you’d think she had nothing to do with the couple there on the sofa.—

— You’re right. You’re right! She somehow distances herself, that is so. Ah-hêh. And she seems to have, well, no feeling for the man who died as a consequence of her act with him that night. She doesn’t show any particular signs of sorrow … for this terrible thing. Which of course is very good, excellent for my case. When I cross examine her. She could have been the one to die. Why not? She doesn’t even consider it. Why not? It takes two, nê? To get going … Yet she shows no remorse that she was at least half the cause of the man’s death, if we grant that he was well aware that he was busy with his friend’s girl. It’s difficult to understand her detachment. As if she’s sure it wouldn’t have been her. I’m aware there are things I won’t get out of her, perhaps — not even with my means.—

And he has a flashed laugh in appreciation of that skill, at once returning to the seriousness the face of the father, fixed on him, may trust.

To recount what passed at a meeting like this with the lawyer means that Harald, who is informing her, and Claudia, who is the listener, both must first tell themselves again, as they must many times, every day, that Duncan has killed someone. Accept that. The man lay in the mortuary, there was a post-mortem which confirmed death by a bullet in the head, and he has now been buried at a funeral arranged by the friends with whom he shared the house; his body was not flown back to Norway, the man Duncan killed is still here, under Duncan’s home ground.

Harald found Claudia talking on the telephone, making contrivedly interested enquiries and comments about someone else’s life; one of the kind friends who make a point of calling regularly to show that the Lindgards are still within society although something terrible has happened to place them out of bounds. She stares at him while she continues to talk and smile as if the friend could see her, not aware of what she is saying; she wants something he does not have, to give. The incongruity between the smile and the stare is anguish he has to harden himself to observe. He goes to the kitchen and watches the water overflowing the glass in his hand as a measure of time. When he comes back she is on the small terrace, waiting for him.

How far has he got?

What is the point of her aggression; as if he, along with the lawyer, were responsible for the lawyer’s request for postponement of the trial so that evidence may be prepared.

We talked mostly about the girl. He finds her a complex character. She hasn’t a good word to say for Duncan — he’s a ‘spoilt brat’—but Motsamai seems to think there’s an advantage in that. It’s difficult for us to follow this kind of legalistic reasoning. He thinks he’s getting her to condemn herself out of her own mouth — something like that.

Condemn herself — she’s not on trial! He wants to show you how clever he is. And were you satisfied that’s all? All he’s doing!

It’s just that he sees her as a key prosecution witness. We have to trust his judgment, he quoted a stack of precedents for the kind of case he’s preparing. You and I know nothing about such things. We haven’t exactly had experience, have we, we could read about them in the newspapers or ignore they ever happened … He agrees with you, anyway, if not in so many words. She’s a bitch. The more he inveigles her to reveal herself the better his ‘extenuating circumstances’ can be cited. He says she’s entirely cold about the man who died, no conscience, not even the sense that she might have been the one in his place. So sure of herself, she wouldn’t be harmed whatever she did. God knows why.

Because Duncan was in love with her.

At what she has just said Harald feels a rising disgust, distress that he cannot suppress.

So you believe in that kind of love, she fucks with another man, so her lover kills him! Proof of love. I thought you had a better opinion of your own sex, you’re responsible for your actions, as we men are. You call that love. Where did he get that love from!

I’m trying to understand, Harald. Haven’t you been in love.

What a bloody stupid question. You ask that. I was in love with you. I thought I would have died for you, though I suppose that was a safe illusion of youth, knowing I was unlikely to need to. But to imagine I would have killed anyone. Even myself. No. Love is life, it’s the procreative, can’t kill. If it does, it’s not love. It’s beyond me, beyond me to imagine what he felt for that woman.