Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Oh leave me alone. I’m a killer because you see people die of lung cancer.

At what point does what’s let pass become serious. Harald? If God allows you to condone so much in yourself how do you decide someone won’t take the example that you don’t have to follow the rules because the people who’ve taught you to don’t do so themselves. Of course they know when to stop. Because nothing in their lives goes any further. They’re safe. Making money out of cigarettes, that’s not much of a sin for a good Christian.

Claudia is not looking at him as she speaks. Her head is turned away. If it were to control tears it would break the tension which is both hostile and exciting, his heart gushes like a geyser at his breast, against her. She does not offer tears; she asserts the severance of not seeing him. What has happened has brought into the order of the townhouse what it wasn’t built to contain; she’s right, there — their life together was not equipped to sustain itself so far, to this edge. People have ambition that their sons should go further; theirs has made of this a horror.

She said once, What did I do to him that you didn’t do? He wanted to say now in his controlled voice that he could use with the force of a shout, And what is it I didn’t do for him that you didn’t do? Why me? Because I’m the man. That sudden resort to the female tactic. Putting on the sheep’s clothing of weakness when it suits you. I’m the man and so I’m responsible, I buy shares whose profits you spend, money that kills, I made him a murderer, a dead chicken and a man with a bullet through the head, it’s all on the road to hell.

Hostility had sucked all communication into its vacuum. If he’d opened his mouth, God knows what would have come out.

So Harald is able to believe his son did it and that he must be punished. No confession (already made), repentance in exchange for forgiveness possible. So much for the compassion of Harald’s God and of his Only Son who was conceived not of penetration and sperm (because that’s human and dirty) but who took on himself all human sin to cleanse all others who sin. So much for the religious faith that the father had lived by in moral superiority, going off to pray and confess (what?) every week, and every Sunday taking the small boy with him to give him the guidance for his life, the brotherly love and compassion decreed from on high while the mother turned over in bed and went back to sleep. She carried about within her the wretched apostasy of the father as she had carried the foetus he had implanted when she was nineteen.

The great eye of the sun bleared under a cataract of cloud: the diffused glare confused the planes of the face so that for a few moments Harald and Claudia were not sure which black face this was. They were in the parking ground among police vans, he locked the car with the touch on the electronic device, out of habit, they were turned to the fortress. There was recognition acknowledging them, in the face; they and the man approached each other across the space between arrival and the entrance doors that always seemed so long to cover. Khulu. What was it again: Dladla. From the property where the cottage was. From the house, the sofa. He was leaving after a visit to Duncan. Duncan was back in a cell from the madhouse. They were going to Duncan. A strange suffusion of warmth accompanied their coincidence. Harald had not seen the man since waiting in the house stared at by that other eye, the computer, Claudia probably had not seen him at all since some invitation to the house given by their son in a time before what happened. She found no purpose, nothing to be learnt in going to be confronted by the place, it could only be like being forced to look at a grave where after a post-mortem duly performed a man had been stowed out of mind. The victim disappears, the perpetrator remains. It could only rouse revulsion at what the room had witnessed, and she couldn’t risk this revulsion against the one who said he had performed the act.

Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla. He, too, brought to the prison what was missing, Duncan himself, somewhere existing outside. Any grim redolence of the house he had about him was evaporated in the glare on prison gravel; they felt some sort of gratitude. They had no-one else; only Hamilton.

A curved tooth of some captured feline set in gold tangled with an ornate Ethiopian cross on the broad breast in the opening of a shirt left unbuttoned. A gleam of cuff-links and a red-stone ring — these elaborations along with the other, anti-materialist convention of frayed jeans and sneakers — he was normality, a variety of contemporary ordinariness made surprising, simple freedom appearing in the sterility of this space before blind walls, like a daisy pushing up through stones.

— No, man, he’s okay. I think so. I really do. I would have come before but, like, I didn’t know how he’d feel. To see me, and so on. He’s all right.—

This was one of the two friends who had found their friend with his sandal hanging from the thong on his foot, killed by a bullet from a gun that belonged casually to all who used the house, shared brotherly as the cigarette packs lying about and the drinks in the kitchen. He was one of two friends who ran to the cottage to tell their other friend something terrible had happened.

And suddenly, as they stood so close together in shelter before the prison he’d left and they were about to enter, his face very near them struggled with a changing tension of muscles and his eyes, appalled by what was overcoming him, grew large, brimming. He drew tears through his nose with the unashamed snort of a child.

Claudia put a hand on his arm.

But a man must not be patronized or humiliated by the hiatus of another man’s silence: Harald himself had been blinded in this way, once, driving back from the prison at the beginning of awaiting trial. — I’m sure he was glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Thank you.—

Duncan’s manner stopped their mouths against any concern about how the ordeal under scrutiny among the schizophrenics and demented had passed. And he did not acknowledge to them that there had been a visitor before them. He had ready a list of things he wanted attended to and time was on his heels, they must know as well as he did, by now, how soon the warders would shift from one heavy foot to another: back to the cell. There was a distanced practicality in his delivery. As if the probing of doctors had shaken him out of some stunned condition, in there, that place where the human mind in all the frightening distortions of its complexity is exposed. They were to get in touch with Julian Verster (they would know how to do that? If not at home, then at the firm, the architects’ office) and get him to remove what was still on his, Duncan’s, drawing board. Plans. The work he was in the middle of. — I can do it here. They can’t stop me. Motsamai’s arranged it. And tell Julian to bring everything I need, everything, down to the last pen. Motsamai’s arranged for a table.—

Harald noted dictated payments that had to be made: overdue. Time must have been destroyed with everything else in Duncan’s life, and now the sense of what had passed, stopped dead at the moment of the act, had to be reckoned with. Insurance for the car. And it ought to be put up on blocks. To protect the tyres. The battery disconnected. Unless she would like to use it — for a moment the son was aware of her, remembered as if it were to be taken seriously his mother’s jaunty enjoyment when she once tried out driving the second-hand Italian sports car; a vehicle for the transport of a young man’s past life.

— The policy should be in a drawer. The bedroom. A file with other things.—

Harald has no need to make a note of this, he has been there before, looking into what was not for his eyes.