Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

She is gazing at Harald with great concentration as if waiting for some move in him to be detected.

I don’t understand you, Claudia.

He wants to know everything, Duncan’s childhood, his adolescence, everything — from me. As if I produced him by parthenogenesis. Only me.

That’s nonsense. That’s not so. You know the reason he has to question us both, everything we remember, everything we know — our own son, who else could know it! So that he can show what awful pressures ended up in him doing what he did. Against his nature, his background. What our son says he did. But Motsamai does have some sort of patronizing attitude towards women, so you …

I didn’t find him patronizing.

Then what is it?

As a little boy, was he happy at school, at home, was he ever aggressive, did he confide in me. Of course he was happy! What else could he be, loved as he was. The question could only be asked by someone whose kids get beaten.

She is searching among her own words. He tries to find the right ones for her.

He has the idea that women, somewhere in the background, are more accessible than men, children turn to the mother — it obviously comes from the way things are in his own house. I’ll bet he’s an authority to be reckoned with, there. It’s their style.

She has come upon something.

Did the child have a religious upbringing. Did he go to church.

Harald smiled. So what did you say.

That you were Catholic and took him with you but so far as I know he stopped when he was old enough to decide for himself. I didn’t try to influence him one way or the other.

Well, that’s something we won’t go into now.

And does he believe in good and evil. Does he believe in God.

Does he?

You know that kind of question wouldn’t come up between Duncan and me.

Harald raises his hands stiffly and places the tent of palms from nostrils down lips to chin; his regular breath is warm un the tips of his fingers.

Neither knows whether the man, Duncan, believes in a supreme being by whom he will be judged, finally, above the judgment of the court.

The barrier of hands is discarded.

Perhaps Motsamai’s playing us off one against the other. Has to. So what the one (Harald swiftly censored himself from saying ‘who doesn’t want to remember’) — what the one doesn’t remember he may get from the other. That’s all.

The townhouse is a court, a place where there are only accusers and accused. She leans back in her chair, arms spread-eagled on the rests, preparing, baring herself.

What have I done to Duncan that you didn’t do?

Of course what the lawyer’s getting at — what he wants is to be able to convince the judge that the self-confessed murderer is one to whom, because of a devout Catholic background, his own crime is abhorrent. The confession itself is certainly a strong point; he confesses his sin, through the highest secular law of the land, to the law of God. He throws himself on God’s mercy. Jesus Christ died for all others, to kill another is to act in aberration against the Christian ethic in which the boy was brought up, and which is within him still.

And perhaps if she — seated across the room, outside walking the dog, hanging up her clothes before bed, lying beside him with her beeper handy (to hell with them) — if she could have gone beyond the intelligence of the microscope and the pathologist’s finding to intelligence (in its real sense, of true knowledge) that there is much that exists but cannot be known, proved in a testtube or by comparison with placebo results — if she had not been stunted in this dimension of being, the boy might have been the man who at twenty-seven could not possibly bring himself to kill, to have become someone more terrible than the water. ‘Didn’t try to influence him one way or the other.’ But wasn’t that statement her very position? Its power. Mother managed perfectly well to be a loving mother, to do good and care for others by healing the sick. She could look after herself. She quite evidently needed no-one to be accountable to for control of any of the temptations every child and adolescent knows about, to lie, to cheat, to use aggression to get what you want. ‘They turn to the mother.’ Then what he found there was a self-sufficiency of the material kind — and that includes the doctoring, expert preoccupation with the flesh — which if it was enough for her wasn’t enough for him. If that’s what he did settle for when he stopped coming to church.

Stopped; oh but that doesn’t necessarily mean he stopped believing, lost God. That’s something this father does not know any more than does his mother. Even though, while he himself finds communion not only with God but with the unknown people around him in the cathedral in the wrong end of the city, a communion with life which guards him against the possibility of harming anyone, any one of them, no matter what they may be, he knows that there are men and women who remain close to God without partaking of the ritual before a priest. Her son may still believe, in spite of her; my son.

And then again that other special intelligence: of the lawyer, the best Senior Counsel you can get. He knows what he wants, what will serve. It could be that he’ll want to present two moral influences; religious faith from the father, secular humanism from the mother. The two sets of moral precepts the whole world relies on — what else is there — to keep at bay our instinct to violence, to plant bombs, to set ablaze, to force the will of one against the other in all the kinds of rape, not only of the vagina and the anus, but of the mind and emotions, to take up a gun and shoot a friend, the housemate, in the head. What a strong argument for the Defence a dramaturge like Motsamai could make of that: the force of perversion and evil the woman Natalie must have been to bring this accused to fling aside into a clump of fern the sound principles with which he was imbued: one, the sacred injunction, Thou Shalt Not Kill, two, the secular code, human life is the highest value to be respected.

A visit before he goes from one destination to another he’s made for himself; prison to madhouse.

The meek trudge along the corridors where some black prisoner is always on his knees polishing, polishing, the place where all the dirt and corruption of life is quarantined must be kept obsessively clean. If only there were to be disinfectants to wash away the pain, of victims and their criminals, held here. What is Claudia thinking: that he couldn’t have done it? Does she still hang on to that. Much use. Much good it will do any of us.

In a house, in an executive director’s office, in a surgery, each day nothing is ever the same as at the last entry. A flower in a vase has dropped petals. The waste baskets have been emptied of yesterday, an ashtray displaced. A delivery of pathologists’ reports has been made.

The visiting room and the table and two chairs and the watching walls are always exactly the same. Two warders, one on either side of the accused, now, are the same nobodies; only Duncan is the element out of place, doesn’t belong here. Duncan is Duncan, his face, the timbre of his voice, the very angle of his ears — the visitors’ attention sets about him a nimbus, the existence of his presence elsewhere, as it surely must be if there is any continuity in being alive, in the places in the city that know him, in the townhouse, come for Sunday lunch; in that cottage. They bring with them himself ; having never experienced prison before, they do not know that this is what a prisoner receives from visitors.

He is all right, yes; they are all right, yes. His mother lightly strokes her hand down the side of her cheek to convey appreciation of his beard, which has grown out wiry ginger-bright rather like the filaments of light-bulbs. The preamble is over.