Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

The discourse is slowing down. All three were on some reckless vehicle together and it was braking as it approached a dangerous blind rise over which there would have to be a new surge.

— Well. Dladla, yesterday. Yes. We were talking. In English and also, yesterday, in our language, when there are difficult things to say it’s better to use the words that are closest.—

Motsamai struck the flat of his palm at his chest.

— He told me many things. I thought I had it all straight from my sessions with Duncan — but this man told me. He told me something else. I don’t think you know. You would have said, you’d know I’d need to know, that’s so.—

He is looking at the two of them with the patronizing compassion of an adult who suspects a child of maybe not being entirely open to him. His head is lowered but the gloss of his eyes under fold-raised forehead glistens at them.

They knew nothing. Nothing. That was it, that was so! It was an accusation, not from the lawyer, but from each to the other, Harald, Claudia, another killing, a common life speared through, flung down: you, a father who knew nothing about your son, let him share a gun like a six-pack of beers; you, a mother who knew nothing about your son, let him fire it.

But Hamilton, their Hamilton Motsamai, had no part in this fierce flash of animus between them, although, diagnostician-priest-confessor that he was, he might have sensed it, brought from the Other Side his particular kind of mother-tongue prescience.

— Khulu knows something else. — He is racing the three of them down the steep descent now, can’t stop. Don’t speak: —Natalie was not the only lover on the sofa. Khulu says Duncan and Carl Jespersen were lovers at one time. Jespersen broke up the affair, not Duncan. Khulu says Duncan took it badly. He didn’t move away, out of the cottage, although the other one — Jespersen had stayed there with him — went back to live in the house. But he was hurt, Khulu says he saw it. Depressed. Even if he wanted to show he wasn’t any less free than the others—‘for us, people can change partners, no big deal, still friends’ that’s how the fellow puts it — Duncan somehow underneath didn’t have the same facility, the same attitude. And then it so happened that he went to the coast and found the girl to save. Saved himself. Khulu suggests. He doesn’t know if Duncan had met her before, he thinks he might have, somewhere, when she was still with the other man, the father of the child she had. So he came back in love with a woman and brought her into the set-up. Nobody minded, no prejudices, he was free to do as he liked, and everything’s fine, Miss Natalie James fits in very well. There is the heterosexual couple in the garden cottage and the gay trio in the house. David Baker and Carl Jespersen are lovers, Jespersen’s fling with Duncan is a thing of the past, for Duncan just as these episodes are for the others. And then, and then … Jespersen is the one who makes love to the woman. Duncan’s woman. A wife, I call it, living there like any ordinary couple in that cottage. Oh we’re told there were other little adventures she had. But this is Carl Jespersen. First he rejects the man and then he makes love to the man’s own woman. He’s there to be found on top of her — I’m sorry Claudia — right there on the sofa in the room where they’re all such good friends!—

Motsamai is hearing applause, excitement moves his shoulders under the padding of his jacket which keeps them so elegantly squared. In an earlier generation, on what the law decreed as his Side, he would have had no recourse for this spirit but the pulpit. He had commanded them completely so that they could not have interrupted him; now he expects something outspoken from them. But all there is in this chamber, a familiar of the many emotions of people in trouble, is his rhetoric; and his clients’ estrangement, neither wishing to admit any reaction to the other.

At last, it was Harald who spoke. Words are stones dropped one by one.

— Does it make any difference whose lover he shot.—

In their absolute attention that magnified every detail of his demeanour, both saw Motsamai’s muscles relax beneath the jacket and the encirclement of his shirt collar and tie-knot.

— Ah, I’m glad you take it like that. Harald, Claudia. (He summoned and commanded each, formally.) That’s how it should be. I’m impressed. That’s what we need if I am to proceed in my client’s interest, effectively, no nonsense. I have difficult decisions ahead. Because it does make a difference! It could make a crucial difference! This factor. The prosecutor — he’ll have no purpose in calling any of the friends: as witness to what? The State’s case rests on the confession. That’s sufficient. It’s the Defence’s decision whether or not to put Dladla on the witness stand. Dladla’s not going to be questioned about this aspect unless the Defence decides to bring it up. What matters is my and my colleagues’ decision. That’s the way to look at what you’ve just heard. That’s all that matters. You are wise; believe me. Oh you are wise.—

Harald stood up as if someone had beckoned, so that Claudia turned towards the door. Which way, which way . She rose. Motsamai — Hamilton — came gently over to guide them.

— Don’t discuss this with anyone.—

Claudia lifted a strand of hair off her forehead and looped it behind her ear, looking at him. — If you call Dladla to the witness box what is the effect on the judge going to be. How are you to know his attitude to this sort of complication.—

— Oh just like you two and myself, anyone is aware of the kind of set-up there apparently was in that house. Men with men. Nothing special about that, nothing to be ashamed of, condemned, these days — the new Constitution recognizes their right of preference. That is so. That’s the law.—

Sinking.

Sinking down in the lift they were alone. Enclosed together.

What a mess.

In contemplation, as if it had been come upon by chance in somebody else’s life.

Did you mean what you said, what does it matter whose lover it was that was killed?

The cloth of her sleeve and his were touching.

I mean it. Why did he take on a kind of life, a range of emotions he just isn’t equal to. Who did he think he was.

Harald is able to speak it out, to her.

Claudia hugged her shoulders against her neck; about to shame herself with an ugly giggle. Hamilton has the idea we’d be more concerned about the homosexuality than what happened.

Buggery may be criminal to him.

The mirrored box that caught their private images from all angles, a camera identifying them, halted with a shudder and Harald stepped back in an exaggerated gesture of convention for her to precede him.

In the car he released the locking device which secured it against thieves; they buckled their safety belts. That’s what I asked about the judge. I was thinking of the old guard, the good Christians of the Dutch Reformed Church, some of them are surely still on the bench. But a black judge might be much the same, anyway, when it comes to that.

A mess is something before which you don’t know where to begin: what to turn over, pick up first, only to put the fragment down again, perhaps in a place it never belonged. This ‘discovery’ of Hamilton’s could not stun where already the blow of that Friday had made its iron impact; punch-drunk, after that has been survived, everything else is its fall-out. As the sight of Duncan coming between two policemen into the court was, as the first visit to the visitors’ room was. What more could happen after something terrible has happened; what could measure against that fact. At night they talked in soft voices although there was no-one to hear them in the townhouse; expensively built, the walls sound-proof against the curiosity of neighbours. They lay in the dark, no longer in isolation. Sorting together through the mess. You cannot do this on your own.