Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Then maybe he hates her. Punished her by doing away with the man she wanted. If you kill her you spare her suffering.

We’re not talking about some euthanasia debate among doctors. As if he doesn’t know that if she loses one man she’ll find another.

We were in love, you were in love with me, rather crazily, you say — what if you’d ever found me the way he found her?

Claudia. How do I know. I can’t feel again as I would have felt, then. I would have walked away from you, we wouldn’t have been here, there would have been no Duncan — that’s what I say now. Oh but maybe I’d have claimed you back and fucked you myself, how do I know what I would have done, in love. Spoilt brat or not, that kind of love doesn’t come from me. I wouldn’t have taken anybody’s life.

You can say that because we know now that you have to live on through any disaster.

Could you have done it? There are women who say they’ve killed ‘for love’—what a question to you, who spend your life keeping people alive. What an insult, to ask.

But it was more like a jeer.

There are also women who when they have something to say that never should be said, raise their voices, fling out the words, and there are other women who are drop-voiced as if communicating with themselves and are overheard on such occasions. Claudia’s one of them.

I understand now I’ve never been in love like that — crazily, as you say. Never.

Stop the clocks, lock the doors, but every summer night there is repeated the afterglow they used to come out to enjoy as it raised the sky with light from the bonfire of the day. Another day; awaiting. They still come out. Awaiting trial. They pass the newspaper between them as people do who are not on speaking terms but recognize one another’s presence. They are here, there is no remedy. When there were the usual disappointments and setbacks in their lives — small, small, dwindled to the trivial — they would come home and burrow into each other in bed. He drinks his nightly alcohol ration while the birds (Black-faced Weavers, common to the region) make conversation like foreigners in a bar.

Spoilt brat.

She looked up, at the quotation.

Oh that’s passing the buck from adult responsibility for what you do. The toilet-training syndrome. I would never have tolerated a child of mine as spoiled.

‘Spoilt’. Over-indulged. Chocolate and toys. But there’s another meaning to the word; to spoil something is to damage it for good. Like that burn in your carpet.

You know everything — you’ve read everything, do people commit crimes out of self-hatred? Is it true? Isn’t that another explanation people give? Why should he hate himself? What had he done to make him able to do what he did.

He passed her another section of the paper and returned to the pages he had. To think — thinking — of things to which were given only a moment’s skimming attention, before: an intelligent person reads selectively, no real interest in following the sex adventures of pop stars or the lurid crimes that must have been performed by the deranged. But now — here was that woman who strapped her two small children into their safety seats in her car and got out and let it run off a wharf into the water, drowning them.

Other people! Other people! These awful things happen to other people.

It doesn’t matter whose thoughts these were, Harald’s or Claudia’s; they were in the evening air on the terrace, they were in the rooms of the townhouse like the clinging odour of cigarette smoke in curtains and upholstery.

He was aware that he and she were thinking of these things in terms of happening to the perpetrator, not the victim: as if the motive, the will, came from without. But it came from within. ‘The man is what he wished to be, he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

Claudia went alone to the prison. Harald was a delegate to a conference of bankers and insurance brokers called by the Minister of Economic Development; he could not continue to subordinate everything in his engagement book to the susurration in his mind: without the outward performance of normal occupations life could not be even materially sustained. Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, the stranger to whom he was coupled in the processes of the law, would cost six thousand rands a day for appearance in court, and half as much for time spent working on the case in his chambers.

Claudia found herself considering what she should wear; as if, without Harald, there would be a concentration on her presence in which her clothes would reveal an attitude — to her son — her attitude. In winter she wore trousers, shirt and pullover under the white coat of her working day, in summer a cotton skirt and whatever went with it was in the shops each year, she liked to be in contemporary fashion while her profession was old as human history. The healer does not have to be dowdy; the ancients, like sangomas and shamans of the present, wore beads and feathers. If she went to the prison in her work clothes this would, in a sense, be fancy dress; she would not be consulting at her rooms that morning. If she put on the kind of outfit she wore when she attended some medical conference (as Harald wore a dark suit for his) or went to a restaurant with Harald at the invitation of one of his colleagues, it would seem undue respect granted to the authority of the grim place that held her son. If she wore the jeans of her weekend leisure (a euphemism, a doctor’s beeper could recall her to her patients at any time of day or night) this might look like a thoughtless reminder that out there, outside the walls and lookouts with armed guards, people were walking on grass under trees, the Strelitzias were perched in bloom over the townhouse terrace where his parents sat in summer, the man Petrus Ntuli was watering the bed of fern. She dressed, finally without awareness of it, to please him. To be the kind of mother he would want; neither expressive of the judgmental conventions of a parental generation nor attempting to project into his own, to reach him by trying to look young — she knew that she sometimes took unwise advantage of the fact that she did look younger than forty-seven to choose clothes that were meant for younger women. What she wore should confirm: whatever happens, whatever you do, you can always come to me.

Duncan did not remark on Harald’s absence; it was as if he expected her. She was the one to bring up the circumstance of his father’s obligation to respond to an invitation from a government ministry. He sends his love. It was the line scribbled as an afterthought at the end of a letter, even if the supposed message had never been requested to be conveyed.

He said he’d heard something about the conference, on the radio. This tenuous connection somehow bewildered her, as if what he was claiming was a faint voice from the earth being received by someone strapped in a space craft. She could not picture how someone would sit — no there would be no chair in a cell — lie on a mattress on the floor and listen to the living going on. Outside.

She had not noticed, on previous prison visits, that Duncan raised and lowered his eyelids, slowly, while others — she and Harald — spoke to him. It was not blinking, exactly. It was a patient, distant, stoically fanning movement. He hears us out. She was observing him much more intently and clearly this time than she had done before. When Harald was there, she and Harald had between them sensors invisibly extended, like the raised hairs on certain creatures that pick up the impulses of others towards them, which distracted from perception of their son. Each was tense to what the other’s reactions to him were; there was static interference with the reception coming from the son.