Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— And I’m going to need more from you two. You realize that. Ah-hêh … much more. In that area (a spread of the raised hand in the air) we haven’t talked enough. Not nearly enough. What was he like, growing up. Really like. Any problems you might have seen then. What might have affected his reactions later, conflicts and so forth. Some of the things you’ve forgotten, you think over and done with.—

It was as if blinds rattled up from the accord in that room, shadowless clarity fell upon them.

There never were any.

He was a happy boy.

But this was not spoken.

Why is Duncan not in the story? He is a vortex from which, flung away, around, are all: Harald, Claudia, Motsamai, Khulu, the girl, and the dead man.

His act has made him a vacuum; a vacuum is the antithesis of life. If they cannot understand how he could do what he did, neither does he. Except the girl; she might, she would. She was prepared to kill; herself. That’s the nearest you could get to the act upon another. The act itself, not the meaning. He does not remember the act itself; the lawyer believes him or wants to, needs to believe him, but the prosecutor, the judge and the assessors, whoever it is who will be told this will not believe him. He did not, in the words of the lawyer’s question, ‘premeditate’ what he did. It was enacted so quickly, a climax that is over, the unbearable emotion out of grasp, gone. He can follow the sight of the gun lying there, but that is the night before, some idiot was talking of buying one and had asked to be shown how to use the thing. The house gun. It was always somewhere about, no use having it for protection if when the time came no-one would remember where it was safely stashed away. He can see it put down, forgotten, on the table among the bottles and glasses, the night before. And when they — Jespersen, Natalie, the two of them — washed the dishes, cleared up, made love on the sofa, they left it there. The time came. They left it there for him.

He doesn’t see it when he follows how he found them. Exactly how he found them is clear in every detail. They’re both dressed (that’s the way she likes it), only their genitals offered each to the other, her skirt bunched out of the way and his backside still half-covered by his pants as he’s busy inside her. They egg each other on with the sounds that are, he can’t stop himself hearing, familiar to him from both of them, and at the very moment they realize someone has come upon them they are seized by what they can’t stop, it’s happening in front of him, it seems to him that’s what it’s always like, if you could see yourself, a contortion, an epileptic fit. He fled from it. He thought he heard her laughing and crying. He sat in the dark in the cottage waiting for her to feel her way in and say, That’s all there is to it, so! But this time it’s not all there is to it.

How many nights in their terrible hours after their good hours, middle of the night had she stood over him shaking her head of flying hair, a Fury (oh yes, put me on a pillar or something in your Greek classical post-post-modern whateveritis architecture) laughing and crying — they’re the same to her — and bending to him as if he were deaf: ‘You faggot! Why don’t you go back to one of your boys! Go on, go over to the house if I don’t suit you, you want to make me over, Mr Godalmighty.’ She, to whom everything was permissible, would not hesitate to abuse him for what she actually regarded as of no account. In confidence in the freedom of experience, of emotions, she professed and practised, he had done what he never should have — told her of the incident, no, be honest, it was more than that: the time with Jespersen. Given her a weapon to whirl above his head, hold at his throat, and when she saw in him the reaction she wanted, whip away as a big joke.

The awful torrent of her ranting came back to torture him in the cell. She had him cornered there. The most articulate being he had ever known, a kind of curse in her. You dragged me back you made me puke my death out of my lungs you revived me after the madhouse of psychopath doctors you plan you planned to save me in the missionary position not only on my back good taste married your babies because I gave mine away like the bitch who eats the puppy she’s whelped develop ‘careers’ you invent for me because that’s what a woman you’ve saved should have you took away from me my death for that for what you decide I live for said I must stop punishing myself but here’s news for you if I stay with you it’s because I choose I choose the worst punishment I can find for myself I revel in it do you know that

It does not end there. It flows from all the nights they talked until three in the morning, high on her words, they hardly needed anything else. And all the time while she enraged and flayed him — he heard again what he had thrown at her in place of a blow of his hand against her mouth, one violence resisted only for another: I should have let you die. I wish I had let you die — he had been aware in the most intense sorrow of lines she had written for him in one of her poems ‘I’m a candle flame that sways/in currents of air you can’t see./You need to be the one/who steadies me to burn.’ He had not done this for her; he was not the one.

I should have let you die.

Does this mean he wanted to kill her. Look back on his Eurydice he had brought from the Shades, so that she could follow him no more. Rid of her and loving her so much; choosing her disastrously as she said she chose him.

That would have been premeditated. How many times had he stayed the hand that was to go out against her mouth. She was right when she taunted him about his middle-class background; what’s it all about but docility, she laughed. Your parents — a pair of self-righteous prigs. Your father took you to church, he’s a confessing Christian but real Christians are rebels they’ve gone to prison for what they see is wrong instead of taking their piddling little sins to the priest behind the curtain pretending to stand in for God up in heaven. Your mama’s a good liberal, which means she deplored, oh yes, what went on in this country in the old days and let other people risk themselves to change it.

And you (had he said it to her) you think you are an anarchist, and anarchy has no form, it’s chaos you are, and it’s what I’ve left my drawing board for.

All day in the cottage waiting for her to come back and she did not. Other times when there’d been an affair, she disappearing for a few days somewhere, she had reappeared with the little carryall that was provision enough for a weekend with a lover, she had been unapologetic (she was a free being) but calm, obviously pleased to see him. Once she even brought him a souvenir she had collected, a fossil fragment. She could get away with such improbable gestures. There had followed a night of talk. He desired her strongly all through it but did not want to be so soon where another man had been. After a day or two they made love again, and for her it was as if nothing had intervened. That’s all there is to it.

At last, in the late afternoon he got up from their bed where he had lain all day and went over to the house. But first, the strange ordinary movements gone through, he opened a can of pet food, placed it in a bowl outside the door; the dog prancing and leaping about him in anticipation, the simple joy of appetite, existence. He went to the house. He didn’t want to speak to anyone but he heard himself in silent monologue and this time the words were not to be in the middle of the night and not with her. He did not know what he was saying, going to say. He was aggrieved right to the back of his throat, stopped up there. If he had any purpose at all it was to know what whoever was listening to his silence would say. It was Jespersen. Jespersen was lying on the same sofa.