Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

All this forms around Harald and eddies away.

They’ve gone in search of satisfying needs — toilets, food, drink — as at any intermission. Sitting on alone among emptied rows he is no longer disregarded; he is the focus of the shining arena, the vacated half-circle of official chairs up there identified now with the characteristics of the men and women to whom they were allotted. He gets up, walks down the stairs instead of taking the lift, goes out into the unreality of sunlight and the contrapuntal voices of black men working on a hole where some installation, water or electricity, is exposed for repair. Sun and main d’oeuvre — that is, has been the climate of the city, the human temporal taken along as eternal with the eternal. They will be here forever digging and singing. For a few moments dazzled by the sun, easy to have the illusion, nothing has changed. Those names, Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu, two black criminals, are in the cells; the young architect is in his firm’s offices somewhere down there in the living city, drawing plans.

The Death Penalty is a subject for dinner table discussion for those, the others, who will drift back into the Court as Harald will. Their concern, whether they want the State to murder or want to outlaw the State as a murderer, is objective, assumed by either side as a responsibility and a duty owed to society. Nothing personal. The Death Penalty is an issue; it will be decided in this Court, reversed under another constitution in some future time, under some other government, God knows, God only knows how man has twisted and interpreted, reinterpreted, his Word, thou shalt not kill. For these men and women strolling back to the building from the coffee bars they have found down in the streets, their concern is the issue, a dispassionate value above his; he knows, and the God he has been responsible to all his life knows this. Like him, like Claudia and him, it is unthinkable that the issue would ever enter the lives of these men and women — who is there among them or theirs who would be so uncivilized as to kill as a solution to anger, pain, jealousy, despair? The retentionists fear death at the hands of others; the abolitionists abhor the right to repeat the crime by killing the killer; neither conceive they themselves could commit murder.

The only people with whom he would have common cause would be the parents of whoever Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu might be, those to whom what is the subject of leamed argument is not an issue but at home with them, forced entry there by sons who murdered four people, and by the son who put a bullet into the head of the man on the sofa. It was unlikely these parents would be among the crowd in court, almost certainly they are poor and illiterate, afraid to think of exposing themselves to authority in a process incomprehensible any other way than as whether or not a son was going to be hanged one daybreak in Pretoria.

He stood a while after everyone else had re-entered the building. The flash of sunlight on the metal of cars signalled activity unceasing in the city, its chorus was muted into murmurs of what was always left half-unsaid down there; it was reaching him in waves of impulse.

Death is the penalty of life. Fifty. He is fifty; easy to recall the figure, but at this moment in this place he is experiencing what that means, his age. In twenty years the life-span will be reached. He accepts that in obedience to his faith, although many contrive with drugs and implants, Claudia’s domain, an extension. A long time ahead, for him. Fifty, but he still wakes with an erection every morning, alive. Fifty. That the penalty could be paid at twenty-seven — that is what is being laid bare for him, argument by argument, in the guise of an issue. He goes back to the Court to hear what nobody else hears.

Judgment was reserved at the end of the second day of the hearing. With a razor blade Harald cut reports of the proceedings out of the newspapers and added these to his own account, for Claudia. He did not need to confess his assignation; since Hamilton’s carefully off-hand admittance of what was still on the Statute Book both accepted that each was seized in preoccupation with means of dealing with this in his and her own mind; the conspiracy buried its shame, transformed to another end: how to do everything, anything, employ any means to evade for Duncan any possibility of what was still on the Statute Book. Inform themselves. A newspaper published selected surveys of the activities of and views expressed by the judges in the past; inferring that they came to the Constitutional Court already decided in favour of the abolition of the Death Penalty; the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Speculation based on personal background and hearsay which, of course, was most likely the source of Hamilton’s wager disguised as reassurance. But Harald had heard passionate testimony quoting the petition for restoration of the Death Penalty whose number of signatories was growing even while the Court sat; read every day of the robberies, rapes, hijacks — murders — that would bring more and more names to such petitions — imprisonment doesn’t deter, life sentences are always commuted, ‘good behaviour’ in prison releases criminals to kill again: only a life for a life is protection, is justice. He told Claudia of this. Fell silent. Suddenly:

Where do people with infectious diseases go now?

Very slowly, she smiled, for him. Most of those epidemics don’t exist any more. So no more Fever Hospital. People are inoculated as children. What we have to worry about medically is only communicated intimately, as you know; so it wouldn’t be right to isolate the carriers from ordinary contacts, moving about among us. Yet that’s another thing people fear.

There is a labyrinth of violence not counter to the city but a form of communication within the city itself. They no longer were unaware of it, behind security gates. It claimed them. There is a terrible defiance to be drawn upon in the fact that, no matter how desperately you struggle to reject this, Duncan is contained in that labyrinth along with the men who robbed and knifed a man and flung his body from a sixth-floor window — today’s news; tomorrow, as yesterday, there will be someone else, one who has strangled his wife or incinerated a family asleep inside a hut. Violence; a reading of its varying density could be taken if a device like that which measures air pollution were to register this daily. The context into which their own context, Duncan, Harald, Claudia fits, it’s natural. It is in the closed air of a living-room at three a.m. with dry breath of wool from a carpet, the whiff of coffee dregs and the creak of wood under atmospheric pressures. The difference between Harald and Claudia as what they used to be, watching the sunset, and what they are now is that they are within the labyrinth through intimate contact with a carrier of a nature other than the ones Claudia cited. Harald, once again, comes upon his text. It is there one night when he has quietly left the bed not to disturb her, taking up a book he has read before but doesn’t remember. ‘ … the transition from any value system to a new one must pass through that zero-point of atomic dissolution, must take its way through a generation destitute of any connection with either the old or the new system, a generation whose very detachment, whose almost insane indifference to the suffering of others, whose state of denudation of values proves an ethical and so an historical justification for the ruthless rejection, in times of revolution, of all that is humane … And perhaps it must be so, since only such a generation is able to endure the sight of the Absolute and the rising glare of freedom, the light that flares out over the deepest darkness, and only over the deepest darkness …’