Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

No mention is made of the place to which he has been committed by Motsamai to be observed and assessed for his capacity to know what he learned from them, to distinguish right from wrong. They talk obliquely round it.

— The lawyer’s been to see me at the surgery. Quite an interrogation. Asking me all about what you were like, as a child and growing up.—

— Yes.—

Harald made as if to speak. The distraction was ignored by mother and son.

— Duncan, do you think I’ve had any particular influence on you? Anything I did?—

— My mother; of course. But you both had an influence on my life, how could it be otherwise. It’s not a question. Everything you’ve done for me. And why you did it. What do you want me to say? You’ve loved me. You know all that. I know all that.—

This kind of statement would never be made anywhere else but in this dislocated anteroom of their lives.

He looks at them both waiting, each for accusation or judgment from him.

— The letter.—

That’s all he has said. But it is as if with the sureness of his architectural draughtsmanship he has drawn lines confining the three of them in a triangle.

— So you do still remember when your father and I came to see you at the school after what happened that time.—

— But you’d first written a letter. I might even still have it somewhere.—

— D’you remember who signed it?—

— Dad … it’s so long ago.—

— But you remembered about it.—

He was suddenly gentle with his mother. — You repeated what was there — you’ve forgotten — when you came the other day.—

— The lawyer — he asked whether you believe in God. — Claudia brings it out.

But he smiles (it is always disturbingly extraordinary when he smiles in this place, an indiscretion before the two lay figures of warders), and so she can smile with him.

— Yes. Nothing’s irrelevant to Motsamai. He’s a very thorough man.—

— I had the feeling he was fishing for something. Expected to find, with me. Well, you’ve been an adult a long time.—

It was to his father he said as usual, his form of farewell this time as any other, that he was running out of books. — I’ll need them, in that place.—

— Apparently we’re asked not to visit you although as a doctor they can’t really prevent me. Remember that. If anything — anything at all — something goes wrong, insist on your right to call us.—

— Have you ever read Thomas Mann? I’ll bring you ‘The Magic Mountain’.—

In the car, Harald speaks.

He didn’t answer you.

About what?

But he knows she knows.

Faith. God.

It was pretty clear, wasn’t it. If ‘nothing is irrelevant’ to Motsamai, this — question, whatever — is something irrelevant to Duncan, doesn’t exist in his life.

That’s how you want to understand his dodging what you suddenly sprang on him out of the blue. The most intimate question. You put him in your dock.

But Harald, also, has not answered what she put to him, elsewhere. That must mean he does believe she is more responsible than he for what has happened to Duncan, what Duncan has become. She follows the thought aloud: What Duncan has become — whatever that is, neither of us wants to admit what it might be. I mean, how could anyone, how can we be expected—

He, great reader, corrects her imprecision with his superior vocabulary.

Too naive in our security.

Claudia resists the impulse to say thank you very much; self-disparagement is damaging to health, let him indulge in it on his own.

All their lives they must have believed — defined — morality as the master of passions. The controller. Whether this unconscious acceptance came from the teachings of God’s word or from a principle of self-imposed restraint in rationalists. And it can continue unquestioned in any way until something happens at the extreme of transgression, rebellion: the catastrophe that lies at the crashed limit of all morality, the unspeakable passion that takes life. The tests of morality they’ve known — each has known of the other — are ludicrous: whether Harald should allow his accountant to attribute so-called entertainment expenses to income tax relief, whether the doctor should supply a letter certifying absence from work due to illness when the patient had succumbed only to a filched holiday. But what is trivial at one, harmless, end of the scale — where does it stop. No need to think about that, all their lives, either of them, because the mastery has never needed to be tested any further. My God (his God) no! Where do the taboos really begin? Where did their son follow on from their limits beyond anything they could ever have envisaged him — their own — following. Oh they feel they own him now, as if he were again the small child they were forming by precept and example: by what they themselves were. Parents. Since they were once in this adult conspiracy together, neither can get away with absolving him- or herself of their son’s extension of their limits, any more than they can grant absolution from the self-accusations that preoccupy each. Separately, they have lost all interest in and concentration on their activities and are shackled together, each solitary, in the inescapable proximity that chafes them. Incongruous invasions dart each in the midst of conversations with other people which concern, naturally, the normal world they move about in without right. Targeted, they carry these strikes home to the townhouse, and out of the silence, against the touch of cutlery on plates or the voice of the newscaster mouthing from the TV screen, statements without context burst forth.

You’ve got a good holding in tobacco shares, haven’t you? You know people who’ve died of lung cancer. You have No Smoking signs all over your offices. But the dividends are fine.

There is a context; they’re in it. He would never have believed she could be a spiteful woman. He prepares himself, although he is not sure of the exact issue, it must belong somewhere to the only subject they have.

He laughs. Dull-weary. We’re eating chicken and you bought it. I suppose it’s one raised in cruel conditions. Caged.

The last word hits home. What concern is there for chickens while you talk to your son within the walls of a prison.

I’m asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.

It’s the ultimate, isn’t it. Is that what you mean.

No I don’t.

Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal—

Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don’t think I do. I just believe in damage; don’t damage. That’s what he was taught, that’s what he knows — knew. So now — is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.

Of course it’s not. I’ve said: it’s the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.

Before God. She pushes him to it.

Before God and man.

I thought for believers there is the way out by confession, repentance, forgiveness from Up There.

Not for me.

Oh why? She won’t let him off.

Because there is no recompense for the one whose life is taken. Nothing can come to him. It’s only the one who killed that receives grace.

In this world. What about the next. Harald, you don’t accept your faith.

Not on this issue, no.

So you sin with doubt. Is that only now? Her gaze is explicit.

No, always. You don’t know because it’s never been possible to talk to you about such things.

Sorry about that, all I could do was respect your need for that kind of belief. I couldn’t take up something I’m convinced does’t exist. Anyway — you’ve allowed yourself the same latitude I have between what does and what doesn’t count. Even with your God behind you.