Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

The only person with whom they have something in common is Senior Counsel Motsamai; Hamilton. Without bothering to ask permission from them, he had established first-name terms. The fact that he himself was prepared to address Harald by first name was licence granted. He has the authority. Present within it, he has complete authority over everything in the enclosure of their situation. Motsamai, the stranger from the Other Side of the divided past. They are in his pink-palmed black hands.

The Lindgards were not racist, if racist means having revulsion against skin of a different colour, believing or wanting to believe that anyone who is not your own colour or religion or nationality is intellectually and morally inferior. Claudia surely had her proof that flesh, blood and suffering are the same, under any skin. Harald surely had his proof in his faith that all humans are God’s creatures, in Christ’s image, none above the other. Yet neither had joined movements, protested, marched in open display, spoken out in defence of these convictions. They thought of themselves as simply not that kind of person; as if it were a matter of immutable determination, such as one’s blood group, and not failed courage. He did not risk his position in the corporate establishment. Claudia worked at clinics to staunch the wounds racism gashed; she did not risk her own skin by contact, outside the intimate professional one, with the black men and women she treated, neither by offering asylum when she had deduced they were activists on the run from the police, nor by acting as the kind of conduit between revolutionaries her to-and-fro in communities would have made possible. What these people called the struggle — she recognized its necessity, their courage, when she read reports of their actions, in the newspapers; kept away from them outside clinic and surgery hours. Stuck to her own struggle, with disease, and the damage other people caused: yet other people, who tear-gassed and set dogs upon blacks, evicted them from their homes to live in shacks from which old men and women were brought to her dying of pneumonia and children were brought to her dwarfed by malnutrition. She had kept clear of those others, too.

Harald left her asleep on Sunday mornings and went to the cathedral to take Communion. It was down at the east end of the city where the business district ravelled out into blind-front clubs where drugs were peddled, and stale-smelling hotels rented rooms by the hour. In the congregation there was no-one who would recognize him with sympathetic smiles of greeting he would have to meet at the suburban church in the parish of the townhouse. He was alone with his God. It was none of Claudia’s business. It was nobody’s fault but his own that he had not seen, when they married, that she could never change, was ignorant, a congenital illiterate in this dimension of life where they might have been together now in unforeseen catastrophe. The nameless congregation was of all gradations of colour and feature. Paper-white old ladies from pensioners’ rooms and adolescent girls with mussel-shell eyes and cheeks smoothly brown as acorns, thin black men lost in charity hand-me-downs, women in heavy-breasted church black, young men of the streets with Afro-heads like medieval representations of the sun. Phoebus framed in tangled aureoles of hair and beard. He took his turn behind a man the age of his son who breathed the odour of last night’s drinking and scratched at a felted scalp. He took the wine-moistened Host as did this man blessed in Creation with what not long ago had been an affliction, under the law’s malediction of a mixture of both skins, the suffering of black, and the apostasy of white.

Harald’s religion surely protected him from the sin of discrimination. True, he had never done anything to challenge it in others; not until the law had changed society to make this safe and legal for him. All the years he was, as the convenient phrase goes in praise of private enterprise, ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, he had accepted without questioning that black people could not be granted housing bonds; they could not afford to meet payments. A bad risk. That was the fact. The government of the rime should house them: so he voted against that government, who did not do their duty. That was the extent of his responsibility. Now the new laws were addressing many of the factors that had made poverty black people’s condition as the colour of their skin had been their condition. He was one of those who did not initiate but could respond; he was prominent among members of the insurance and bond industry working with banks who were under a similar obligation to take the risk of putting a roof over the heads of people whose only collateral was need. It gave him some satisfaction to think that he was able to be constructive in improving the lives of his fellow men, even if he had failed to follow Christ’s teaching in destruction of the temples of their suffering. He served on a commission comprised of representatives of the new government and of the finance industry. The members were blacks and whites, of course; the bad risk was shared now. At least, if nothing else brought them together, they were on comfortable terms in business philosophy.

It is very different with Motsamai. Hamilton. Servants used to be known to their employers only by first names, everyone knows now it was intrinsically derogatory. This use of a black man’s first name is a sign not of equality, that’s not enough — it’s a sign of his acceptance of you, white man, of his allowing you unintimidated access to his power. In this relationship the comfortable terms, quite accustomed now, of taken-for-granted equality once the appropriate vocabulary and the same references are understood, draws back from an apparition that must have been waiting in the past. In those hands, now. Hamilton. All that exists, in the silences between Harald and Claudia, is the fact of the life of their son. Every other circumstance of existence is mechanical (except for Harald’s prayers; the sceptic resentment Claudia feels when she senses he’s praying). Because of the old conditioning, phantom coming up from somewhere again, there is awareness that the position that was entrenched from the earliest days of their being is reversed: one of those kept-apart strangers from the Other Side has come across and they are dependent on him. The black man will act, speak for them. They have become those who cannot speak, act, for themselves.

The relationship between the lawyer and his clients is not a business relationship of any kind Harald has known although the best available Senior Counsel is highly paid for his services. Claudia should understand it better; it must be more like that of patient and doctor when disablement threatens. But she was dismayed by the lawyer’s suggestion that she and Harald come to his house — for a quiet talk, Harald told her he had said.

What Hamilton had said to him was confidential. — I don’t think Dr Lindgard — Claudia — and I have really hit it off together, yet. I don’t feel she has confidence — you know — in what we lawyers are doing. Ah-hêh. Yes. I want her to get to know me not here, this room reminds her of what is happening to Duncan, this place with the nasty smell of a court about it — isn’t that so? Nê? I want to talk to her in a relaxed way, get her to tell me the kind of thing women know about their kids that we don’t, my friend … I see it with my own youngsters. They’ll run to their mother. We men bring our work home with us in our heads even if we don’t bring it in our briefcases, we don’t seem so sympathetic, you follow. Any childhood traumas are useful to me in this kind of defence where there isn’t the object of proving innocence of a crime — no option for that — but of proving why the defendant was pushed beyond endurance. Yes. To an act contrary to his nature. Ah-hêh. Anything. Anything the mother remembers that would support, say, a deeply affectionate, loyal nature in the defendant. Anything that will show the extent of the damage done to him by the woman Natalie. How she betrayed these attributes he has and wilfully destroyed the natural controls of his behaviour — think of that scene on the sofa! Not even to go into a bedroom, man! She knew anyone could walk in and see what she was up to there, she knew — I believe it — he might come back to look for her, and what he’d find!—