Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— My news is the date is set. A month from today.—

— It couldn’t be sooner?—

— I know it seems long, but Duncan understands. And the judge is the one I had in mind. So.—

— What does Duncan understand, Hamilton? — Harald was not to be fobbed off with some assurance about delay. — We haven’t much way of finding out from him. But you know that, we’ve gone through it with you over and over. Does he understand you’re relying on getting the girl to show she was the one who drove him to some edge of madness from which he could do what he did? She’ll do this, out of her own mouth. I mean, does he believe it: that she was what it was. That he was possessed — in some way. I don’t see how your use of her can help Duncan if he won’t accept this manoeuvring of the — this — I don’t know what to call it — justification.—

— No no, not of the act; of the state of mind, the state of mind, Harald. This was not something premeditated. It was breaking-point — and she put him there, she did it! There on the sofa with Jespersen! It was her work!—

Motsamai was legs apart wide at the thighs, leaning out towards them in his body’s emphasis, as he did from behind the desk in chambers, the gleam of day’s efforts shone on the obsidian of his face, his blackness was the stamp of authority in the room. — He says he’s guilty. That’s all. I’m going to show why. I’m going to show who else is. How.—

— So he hates her now. Whether or not he’s ready to blame her for himself and what he did. Hates her for what he found. — Claudia looked to Harald.

Motsamai answered them both, but taking his attention inward for a moment. — He doesn’t speak about her. He doesn’t want to think of her, that’s my impression. I don’t succeed, in that direction, with him. So I take it he leaves it to me. He knows I’m going to cross examine her.—

— Hates her now. Or he loves her.—

Claudia’s laconic either/or is irrelevant to Motsamai.

— Of course he knows, too, that I’m calling Khulu Dladla. Ah-hêh. —

— For the adventure with Jespersen.—

— Oh indeed. Indeed I shall, Harald. Jespersen has — he had — his part in the state of mind, didn’t he — ve-rr-y much so. He and the girl. Fatal combination. Isn’t there good reason to believe that not content with throwing over his male lover, he got some kind of extra kick out of sleeping with the woman the ex-lover had taken up? Perhaps there was contempt or some sort of revenge, the lover has deserted the set in the house, so to speak, defecting to the female sex. Preferring women! Who really can follow these bisexual variations. They both were Duncan’s lovers. Maybe each had some grievance against him, you know how such things are, even in ordinary love matters — my God, if you could hear some of the motives I come across in my briefs. Man! There could have been spite against Duncan the shameless pair were prepared to enjoy themselves with. Certainly they couldn’t have thought of a better way to hurt and humiliate and push such a man to the point of self-destruction. A confession of guilt can be a kind of suicide. That’s what I see here, and my task is to save my client from it. That’s why I’m going to cross examine Miss Natalie James and I’m calling Mr Nkululeko Dladla.—

Suicide. But he didn’t turn the gun on himself in the cottage, he threw it away.

Claudia and Harald are returned to that scene.

Suicide. The State may do it for you if you are convicted of murder. Harald speaks for them.

— We’ve never discussed the sentence. If the mitigation plea succeeds. Or if it does not.—

Hamilton Motsamai’s face, the depth of bass in a long register of that intoning of his, the groaning, tender ah-hehheh … mmhê reached out to them in embrace. — I know what you’re thinking. But the penalty hasn’t been exacted for some time, there’s been a moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the old Constitution became inevitable. It’s all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. The first case to be heard there, as a matter of fact, is the charge that it is illegal under the interim Constitution. The Death Penalty. I’m confident the Court will rule that it’s unconstitutional. It will be abolished. Finished and done before we get sentence passed down. Ah-hêh. Only for the time being it’s still on the Statute Book.—

As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people — privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate in retribution — dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social policies where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of that State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster — the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr Lindgard once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely, any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still had seemed to have nothing to do with them, with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror — they had been unable to think further, only abstractedly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors’ room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who, in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation to God’s forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.’ The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts’ foyer, of being one among the fathers of thieves and murderers was now confirmed. The instinct to go and worship in the cathedral among people from the streets, which had seemed a way of avoiding the sympathy of his suburban peers, had been the taking of his rightful place with those most bowed to misfortune. The truth of all this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety — that other form of segregation — could change their status. In its way, that status was definitive as the forced removals of the old regime; no chance of remaining where they had been, surviving in themselves as they were . Even money; that could buy for them only the best lawyer available. It could buy Motsamai. Motsamai’s extenuating circumstances stood between them — Duncan, Harald, Claudia — and the decision of another court, a court whose decision would not be made on any circumstances in mitigation of the act of an individual, but on the collective morality of a nation which is the substance of a constitution — the right of an individual to life, even if that individual has taken another’s life, and whether the State has the right itself to become a murderer, taking its victim’s life by the neck, hanged in the early morning in Pretoria.