Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Harald was not there; after a number of visits, it was as Motsamai had said, the warder was no more than the presence of the scarred and scored wood of the table. On it, she was suddenly able to take both Duncan’s hands in hers. She had always admired his hands, so unlike her own with their prominent knuckles and leached skin of doctors and washerwomen; when he was a small child she would spread his fingers and his long thumbs and display them to Harald, look he’s got your hands (and laugh cockily) I made sure he didn’t get my own, didn’t I. She turned them palm-up, now, in that gesture, but he pulled them away and made fists on the table, throwing his head back.

Claudia was appalled. That he should have thought the gesture was a reminder of what he had done with those hands. Here, to him, in this place, you could not explain to him, this was one of those female reminiscences, sentimental, indulgent, that adult progeny rightly find an unwelcome fetter and a bore. It was a moment to get up and run from a room. But this wasn’t that kind of room. Walk out, you can’t walk in again. Can’t come back until the next appointed visiting day. This is not home, where misunderstandings used to be explained away.

The irreparable made her reckless.

— You’ve told him you’re guilty. The lawyer. I can’t believe you.—

— I know you can’t. — He moves his head from side to side, side to side, it’s measuring the four walls, he’s enclosing himself in the walls of the prisoners’ visiting room. She has never seen the cell where he is kept but he has its dimensions about him.

— Do you want me to believe you.—

— Sometimes I do. But I know it’s impossible. Other times I don’t think about it, because whether you’ll accept it or not—

Something terrible happened. She cannot remind him of the letter he wrote so long ago, and the pledge she — his father? — they made.

— Wouldn’t it be better if you tried to tell me something now instead of Harald and me hearing — things — when you have to answer in court—

He continues to move his head like that, it’s unbearable to her.

— so I could tell you now, I’m telling you now that it doesn’t matter what it was that happened, whatever you might have done, you can come to us.—

He gazed at her with deep sorrow changing his face before her, the nose pinched by the grooves that cut into the cheeks on either side, down to the mouth. Better not claim me, my mother.

He did not need to say it.

Slowly, cautiously, she took one of his hands again. — Remember, while you’re shut up here. All the time.—

He did not withdraw the hand.

— You can imagine all the things we want to ask. Harald and I. — She avoided referring to ‘your father’; any reminder of that identity with its authoritarian, judgmental connotations — Harald with his Our Father who art in heaven — could destroy the fragile contact. — Could I say something about the girl?—

— Natalie. — He pronounced the name rather than prompted. As if to say, that’s what stands for her; what has it to do with what she is.

— I didn’t have the impression your affair with her was particularly serious, I mean the few times I saw her with you. And I can tell you I didn’t take to her much. But you probably saw that. Mama being carefully nice when she was really disapproving. Of course. — The slackening of a slight smile, between them. — I thought the other one, the one before, was more your likely choice to live with. This one. I’d look at her when she wasn’t aware of it and I’d see she had the childlike manner of many promiscuous women. They’re the hunters — what would you call it, the predators who look like the hunted. I see a lot of them in my practice, black and white, they have that same manner. I’m not disapproving of her because of promiscuity, you know. My only objection would be on grounds of what it can do to the bodies I have to deal with. I’ve always supposed you’ve had plenty of experiences of your own. When Harald and I were young there were only diseases you could cure with a few injections. Now there’s the one I can’t cure with anything. At the clinic they bring me babies who’ve begun to die of it from the moment they’re born. But I thought — oh I suppose all middle-class people like Harald and me have that snobby notion — you’d mix with the kind of women who’d be as, well, fastidious as you. Fussy about partners. It wasn’t the promiscuity that put me off, it was the manner, the disguise, the childlike manner. My experience is that there’s something quite different underneath. And I must tell you something else. Harald met her at Motsamai’s chambers, and it showed. It certainly wasn’t childlike.—

— What is it about her you want to know.—

— Whatever you’ll tell me.—

— Natalie had a child — not from me — given at once for adoption and then she tried unsuccessfully to get it back and she had a nervous breakdown. That’s when I met her. She recovered, she was full of — you know — the joys of life, return to life. She moved into the cottage with me. She has energy she can’t contain, she wouldn’t ever try to.—

— You knew that?—

— I suppose so. Knew it and didn’t know it. But if you ask about her you have to ask about me as well.—

The warder stirred like a sleeping watchdog. Agitated, she lifted her hand away to look at her watch. Was there time, was there ever time, for this; years had gone by separating the two beings they were, blood counts for nothing.

— You told him you’re guilty.—

— Could you bring me more books. Ask Harald. You don’t have to wait for next week, you can deliver them to the Commissioner’s office.—

But he embraced her, across the table, she took with her on her cheek the graze of what must have been several days’ beard; shut away there he was doing what she knew men did to change their picture of themselves, growing the hair on their faces. There would be no mirror in a prison, shards of glass are a weapon, but he could put up his hand and feel the image.

Driving herself back to the townhouse she was tormented by what she had failed to ask him. The loss of an opportunity alone with him that might not come again; a connection that broke, but that had come briefly, irresistibly into being, no doubt about it. Did he — did he not —think of consequences? How could he not know he would be where he was?

Perhaps he meant to kill himself, after what he had done. No-one had thought of that. He lay on his bed in the cottage and waited for them to come for him. Only resistance was to sleep, or appear to be asleep and not hear them when they hammered on the door. Didn’t he think about what would happen to him ? To her. To Harald.

Awaiting trial. Now there’s been a postponement.

When Harald tells his secretary he will not be in that afternoon everyone in the company knows this must be the day of visiting hours at the prison. If his absence has to be remarked among his peers — apologies from absentees are read out in the routine formalities of a board meeting — there are solemn faces as if a moment’s silence is being respectfully observed; secretaries at their computers and clerks at their files exchange among themselves the country’s lingua franca of sympathy: Shame. The utterance has exactly the opposite of its dictionary meaning, nobody knows how this came about. And in this particular circumstance the reversal is curiously marked: no-one is casting opprobrium at Mr Lindgard for his son’s criminal act; what they are expressing is a mixture of pity and a whine against the injustice that such things should be allowed to happen to a nice high-up gentleman like him.

Harald arid Claudia had close friends, before. Although these are eager to be of use, of support, they cannot be. Harald and Claudia know they have little in common with them now. There is her patient endurance of the telephone calls; without discussion, both avoid invitations, which are more than kindly meant: these few close friends, shocked and genuinely concerned by what has happened, feel left out of the responsibility of human vulnerability, the instinct to gather against it huddling together in some sort of mutually constructed shelter, the cellar of the other kind of war, from the bombshells of existence.