Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

The procession of flesh was laid before the doctor. It was her medium in which she worked, the abundant black thighs reluctantly parted in modesty (the nurse chaffed the women, Mama, doctor’s a woman just like you), the white hairy paps of old men under auscultation. The babies’ tender bellies slid under her palms; tears of terrible reproach bulged from their eyes when she had to thrust the needle into the soft padding of their upper arms, where muscle had not yet developed. She did it as she performed any necessary procedure, with all her skill to avoid pain.

Isn’t that the purpose?

There is plenty of pain that arises from within; this woman with a tumour growing in her neck, plain to feel it under experienced fingers, and then the usual weekly procession of pensioners hobbled by arthritis.

But the pain that comes from without — the violation of the flesh, a child is burned by an overturned pot of boiling water, or a knife is thrust. A bullet. This piercing of the flesh, the force, ram of a bullet deep into it, steel alloy that breaks bone as if shattering a teacup — she is not a surgeon but in this violent city she has watched those nuggets delved for and prised out on operating tables, they retain the streamline shape of velocity itself, there is no element in the human body that can withstand, even dent, a bullet — those who survive recall the pain differently but all accounts agree: an assault. The pain that is the product of the body itself; its malfunction is part of the self: somewhere, a mystery medical science cannot explain, the self is responsible. But this — the bullet: the pure assault of pain.

The purpose of a doctor’s life is to defend the body against the violence of pain. She stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause it. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life.

This body whose interior she is exploring with a plastic-gloved hand like a diviner’s instinctively led to a hidden water-source, has a foetus, three months of life inside it.

I’m telling you true. I was never so sick with the others. Every morning, sick as a dog.

Vomit your heart out.

D’you think that means it’s a boy, doctor? The patient has the mock coyness women often affect towards a doctor, the consulting room is their stage with a rare chance for a little performance. Ag, my husband’d be over the moon. But I tell him, if we don’t come through with it right this time, I don’t know about you, I’m giving up.

The doctor obliges by laughing with her.

We could do a simple test if you want to know the sex.

Oh no, it’s God’s will.

Next come a succession of the usual heart ailments and bronchial infections. Life staggers along powered by worn bellows of old people’s lungs and softly pulses visibly between the ribs of a skinny small boy. Some who turn up this week as every week have eyes narrowed by the gross fatty tissue of their faces and others continue to present the skin infections characteristic of malnutrition. They eat too much or they have too little to eat. It’s comparatively easy to prescribe for the first because they have the remedy in themselves. For the second, what is prescribed is denied them by circumstances outside their control. Green vegetables and fresh fruit — they are too poor for the luxury of these remedies, what they have come to the clinic for is a bottle of medicine. The doctor knows this but she has ready a supply of diet sheets which propose meals made with various pulses as some sort of substitute for what they should be able to eat. She hands a sheet encouragingly to the woman who has brought her two grandchildren to the doctor. Their scarred grey-filmed legs are bare but despite the heat they watch the doctor from under thick woollen caps that cover the sores on their heads and come down right to the eyebrows. The woman doesn’t need the nurse to interpret, she can read the sheet and studies it slowly at arm’s length in the manner of ageing people becoming far-sighted. She folds it carefully. Her time is up. She shepherds the children to the door. She thanks the doctor. I don’t know what I can get. Maybe I can try buy some these things. The father, he’s still in jail. My son.

Charge sheet. Indictment. Harald kept himself at a remove of cold attention in order to separate what was evidence against interpretation of that evidence. Circumstantial: that day, that night, Friday, 19th January, 1996, a man was found dead in a house he shared with two other men. David Baker and Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla came home at 7.15 p.m. and found the body of their friend Carl Jespersen in the living-room. He had a bullet wound in the head. He was lying half-on, half-off the sofa, as if (interpretation) he had been taken by surprise when shot and had tried to rise. He was wearing thonged sandals, one of which was twisted, hanging off his foot, and beneath a towelling dressing-gown he was naked. There were glasses on an African drum beside the sofa. One held the dregs of what appeared to have been a mixture known as a Bloody Mary — an empty tin of tomato juice and a bottle of vodka were on top of the television set. The other glasses were apparently unused; there was an unopened bottle of whisky and a bucket of half-melted ice on a tray on the floor beside the drum. (Evidence combined with interpretation.) There was no unusual disorder in the room; this is a casual bachelor household. (Interpretation.) The room was in darkness except for the pin-point light of the CD player that had come to the end of a disc and not been switched off. The front door was locked but glass doors which led from the living-room to the garden were open, as they generally would be in summer, even after dark.

The garden is one in which a cottage is sited. The cottage is occupied by Duncan Lindgard, a mutual friend of the dead man and the two men who discovered him, and they ran to him after they had discovered Jespersen’s body. Lindgard’s dog was asleep outside the cottage and apparently there was no-one at home. The police came about twenty minutes later. A man, a plumber’s assistant, Petrus Ntuli, who occupied an outhouse on the property in exchange for work in the garden, was questioned and said that he had seen Lindgard come out on the verandah of the house and drop something as he crossed the garden to the cottage. Ntuli thought he would retrieve whatever it was, for Lindgard, but could not find anything. He called out to Lindgard but Lindgard had already entered the cottage. Ntuli did not have a watch. He could not say what time this was, but the sun was down. The police searched the garden and found a gun in a clump of fern. Baker and Dladla immediately identified it as the gun kept in the house as mutual protection against burglars; neither could recall in which of their three names it was licensed. The police proceeded to the cottage. There was no response to knocking on the door, but Ntuli insisted that Lindgard was inside. The police then effected entry by forcing the kitchen door and found that Lindgard was in the bedroom. He seemed dazed. He said he had been asleep. Asked whether he knew his friend Carl Jespersen had been attacked, he went white in the face (interpretation) and demanded, Is he dead?

He then protested about the police invasion of his cottage and insisted that he be allowed to make several telephone calls, one of which was to his lawyer. The lawyer evidently advised him not to resist arrest and met him at the police station where fingerprint tests were inconclusive because the clump of fern had been watered recently and the fingerprints on the gun were largely obliterated by mud.

This is not a detective story.

Harald has to believe that the mode of events that genre represents is actuality.

This is the sequence of actions by which a charge of murder is arrived. When he recounts to Claudia what he heard from the lawyer she moves her head from side to side at each stage of detail and does not interrupt. He has the impression she is hearing him out; yet when he has finished, she says nothing. He sees, from her silence, he has said nothing; brought back nothing that would explain. Duncan came out of that man’s house and dropped something in the garden on his way back to his cottage. A gun was found. Duncan said he was asleep and did not hear either his friends or the police when they knocked at the door. None of this tells anything more, gives any more explanation than there was in the confrontation across the barrier in court. His brief embrace with head turned away. His reply to any need: nothing. Harald sees, informed by Claudia’s presence, that what he has related, to himself and her, is indeed a crude whodunnit.