Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Without rejection of all that is humane, in the times only just become the past a human being could not have endured the inhumanity of the old regime’s assault upon body and mind, its beatings and interrogations, maimings and assassinations, or his own need to plant bombs in the cities and kill in guerrilla ambushes. Is that what this text is saying to Harald? What happens, afterwards, to this rejection of all that is human that has been learnt through so much pain, so lacerating and passionate a desperation, a deliberate cultivation of cruel unfeeling, whether to endure blows inflicted upon oneself, or to inflict them on others? Is that what is living on beyond its time, blindly roving; not only the hut burnings and assassinations of atavistic political rivalry in one part of the country, but also the hijackers who take life as well as the keys of the vehicle, the taxi drivers who kill rivals for the patronage of fares, and gives licence to a young man to pick up a gun that’s to hand and shoot in the head a lover (lover of a lover, in God’s name, who can say) — a young man who was not even subject to the fearsome necessities of that revolution, neither suffering blows inflicted upon himself, nor inflicting suffering upon others, as with the connivance of his parents he never was thrust further into conflict than the training camps where his target was a dummy. Violence desecrates freedom, that’s what the text is saying. That is what the country is doing to itself; he knows himself as part of it, not as a claim that what his white son has done can be excused in a collective phenomenon, an aberration passed on by those in whom it mutated out of suffering, but because violence is the common hell of all who are associated with it.

Get him off.

The crude expression from the jargon of the criminal fraternity was the apt one for the determination they were committed to now. Some way, hook or by crook — yes, the old metaphor openly accepted, expected deviousness. Since Harald read out to Claudia the judgments reported in court cases they never would have glanced at, before, having had no taste for vicarious sensations, they were aware of how interstices of the law, abstruse interpretations of the word of the law saved accused who in all other respects were unmistakably guilty. Got them off.

Where Claudia had gone reluctantly in summons to Counsel’s chambers, she and Harald together now badgered Hamilton Motsamai for his time. What they wanted from him was wiliness, a special kind of shrewd ability a lay individual could not have and that people whose generalized prejudices they used to find distasteful attributed to lawyers who belonged to certain races. Jewish or Indian lawyers, those were the ones. Would a black lawyer have the same secret resources? Was it a sharpened edge that could be acquired in legal practice and training? Or was it in the making of a racial stereotype brought about originally by the necessity of those certain races to find ways of defeating laws that discriminated against them? In which case, why shouldn’t Hamilton have developed every natural instinct of life-saving wiliness and shrewdness, who better? Why should he be presumed to have forgone it forever in exchange for the lofty professional rectitude of an Aryan member of the Bar who had never lived on the Other Side? Was it there in his chambers, slyly, under the gaze of the framed photographs of his presence among distinguished Gray’s Inn colleagues in London? Harald thought it was; the whole approach to the girl, the prying into her motivation in the relationship with their son, was to him an indication. But Claudia, in conflict with the trust she had come to place in the man, wondered whether one of the others, spoken of by people whose admiration was also denigration, would not be the right advocate for any means, any means whatever, that could be found to defend their son. A Jew, an Indian. Though she did not say so, her husband understood; many compromises with stereotype attitudes easily rejected in their old safe life were coming about now that the other values of that time had been broken with. Once there has been killing, what else matters? Only what might save another. The townhouse ethics of doctor, board member, are trivial.

Hamilton responded with zest to the new attitude he sensed in them. As if he had been coaxing it all along, ah-hêh, ah-hêh, nice decent white couple from their unworld. He did not see, or pretended not to see, that they thought they were making some challenging disguised demand for him to do something, anything unethical (as they saw it) in defence of their son. The ignorance of educated people, white and black, of the conventions of the law was endlessly surprising, probably she would have the same thing to say about people and the practice of medicine. They still did not understand the scope to be claimed by a leading Counsel in defence tactics. How else could one take on representation of a self-confessed murderer?

— Couldn’t you use what’s the man’s name — Julian — the one who told us, the one Duncan called right away, that night? I have the feeling he dislikes the girl, he’s been present at scenes she made that shocked him, when she behaved — Idon’t know — wildly, provocative towards Duncan in the way you’ve said will be important. —

— My Heads of Argument, yes. — He encourages Claudia.

— Things you can get out of him. Although he strikes me as being reluctant to talk because he’s got some idea of the confidentiality of friendship and all that. Loyalty to what went on in that house, maybe he’s afraid of others reproaching him …—

— Oh you are right. I’ve been working on him. Withdrawn fellow. But the point is, what you say about the house, those who frequent it or live there — true, he likes to have found favour with them, but he’s really attached to Duncan, Duncan’s the one who matters to him. But I doubt if he’s worth calling as a witness.—

Harald keeps in pursuit of the other, Khulu. — Isn’t he more impressive? If I were a judge I’d give more weight to what he might be prepared to say. And he actually is a member of that household, he’s not someone who happens to work with Duncan, a colleague from outside, a friend who wasn’t always around to observe what went on. Whereas Khulu.—

— And Khulu is gay. Ah-heh. He knows the kind of morals, whatever you like to call it, what’s done and not done, in the way they arrange their lives, settle things between them.—

I mean

Could it

Not that

Ah-hêh

I mean

Just a moment

But if

Let me explain

They become animated, it’s both a consultation and a contest. Blessedly for his clients in trouble, Duncan has become an issue, not there, present among them in his prison cell as he usually is when the parents are in chambers.

The plumber’s assistant-cum-gardener: is he worth calling?

— With what purpose? The State can have him! — Motsamai is suddenly very attractive when he laughs, some persona he keeps for other occasions breaks out of protocol, whether it comes from his place, distinguished by the African cut of his beard-wisp, in a coterie of ancient aristocracy, or whether it is his mastery of the other, the legal fraternity’s bonhomie in chambers’ dining-room.

The vulgar street term isn’t used here: get him off. But it is mutually understood in its limitations. What his clients are asking, they and their Counsel know cannot set Duncan free; free of what he says he has done, free of what contains him as he was once in his mother’s womb, unseen. Punished he must be, whether by the will of his father’s God or the man-made laws his mother lives by. The term can serve only as the means, all and every means, to set him out of reach of what is still on the Statute Book. His life for a life.