Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

So he came upon him again.

The man lifted his head and smiled, opening his eyes wide under cocked brows and pulling down the comers of his mouth, his familiar attractive representation of culpability in the style of an accomplished mime. What he said was: Oh dear. I’m sorry, Bra . The form of address picked up from the black frequenters of the communal house came in handy to assert between the two of them overall brotherhood which would absorb any transgressions.

It was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.

Bewilderment exploded; he had not had in mind anything but her, she was what was filling him right up to the source of speech, she was what he was carrying before him in accusation, the corpse of his emotions. With the enactment of those words, that facial gesture there came the stun of that previous blow, he felt again, saw lying there relaxed in one of those remembered Japanese cotton gowns and flexing the toes of a muscular foot in favoured sandals, the tom bereavement of that rejection which he had long thought of as a forgotten phase in the evolvement that living is, as the passions and frustrations of adolescence dwindle to their minor proportions. It was Jespersen who was lost; lost in the body of the girl. Jespersen too, was the corpse of life. This man had himself destroyed it all, everything, the meaning of himself and the meaning of the girl, in the contortions, the hideous fit of their coupling.

Talk. Jespersen with his sing-song Norwegian English talked reason that was obvious. We are not children. We don’t own each other. We want to live freely don’t we. We shouldn’t stifle impulses that bring people together, whether it’s going to be sex or taking a long walk, never mind, eh. The walk is over, the sex is over, it was a nice time, that’s it, isn’t it. Just unfortunate we were a bit too impulsive. I mean, she’s a girl who usually arranges things more privately, doesn’t she. All of us know it … you know it, my Bra. It hasn’t changed things with you and her before. You see, you should never follow anyone around, never, that’s a mistake, that’s for the people who make a prison out of what they feel and lock someone up inside. If it hadn’t turned out the way you made it turn out, she’s a great girl you’ve got, she would never have given it another thought and me too, for me no claims just part of the good evening we had, the drinks, the laughs she and I had cleaning up together. Why don’t you help yourself to a drink.

Talk.

All through the talk there was another babble going on inside him as if the tuning knob of a transistor were racing from frequency to frequency, snatches and blarings of the past, of the night, other nights, despair, self-hatred, inexpressible tenderness, raw disgust, insupportable rage for which there was no means of order. The communications of the brain were blown. He could not know what it was he thought, felt under the talk, talk, talk. It was the grand apocalypse of all the talk through all the nights until three in the morning. It was that he must have put an end to when he picked up the house gun left lying in his peripheral vision and shot their lover, his and hers, in the head.

That’s all there is to it.

Of course he would never do such a thing. So that is why there is nothing to explain to those poor two when they come to sit with him in the visitors’ room. What there was, is, in himself he did not know about, they certainly did not, cannot know. The clever lawyer must make up an explanation. We are now in your hands, Bra. It was the lawyer who told him the post-mortem confirmed that Carl, Carl Jespersen, was dead of a gunshot in the head. That was how he came to believe it. He had not seen Carl bleed. He had not waited to see what picking up the house gun had done. He had fled as he fled into the garden when he overturned and broke a lamp in his mother’s bedroom as a child. If the death sentence is to be carried out perhaps the brain should go to research; maybe there is an explanation to be found there that might be useful. To society. All he can do for the two in the visitors’ room is hope that society won’t subject them to much publicity when the trial begins. He has status as a big-business target for the journalists in one sector, she has status as a target in the sector of good works for humanity; people will like to see what press photographers can show of people of status whose son has done what he never could do. But perhaps it will go unnoticed, what is an indoor killing (homeground in the suburbs), lovers’ obscure quarrel, gays’ domestic jealousy, something of that kind, in comparison with the spectacular public violence where you can film or photograph people shot dead on the streets in crossfire of the new hit-squads, hired by taxi drivers and drug dealers who have learnt their tactics from the state hit-squads of the old regime with its range of methods of ‘permanently removing’ political opponents, from blowing them up with car and parcel bombs to knifing their bodies again and again to make bloodily sure bullets have done their work.

If something could be found in the lobes of the brain to explain how all, all these, like himself, could do these things; continue to wound and savage and, final achievement of it all, kill.

A house gun. If it hadn’t been there how could you defend yourself, in this city, against losing your hi-fi equipment, your television set and computer, your watch and rings, against being gagged, raped, knifed. If it hadn’t been there the man on the sofa would not be under the ground of the city.

He was a happy boy. Wasn’t he. Claudia did not have to ask Harald that question. Of course he was. What did they have to recall from what — the lawyer attributed to them — they ‘thought over and done with’. As if there were to be something hidden; from him; from themselves. What did Duncan want of them. What did he need of them.

Have you still got the letter?

One of those box files in the old cupboard we brought when we moved. But there’s only the first page.

Yes, he remembered; they had thought of it, unavoidable, in all their confusion after that Friday night. A terrible thing happened the boy wrote. They had accused each other over who was or was not responsible to tell their son we’re always there for you. Always.

I was thinking it might be something for Hamilton. But I suppose not. It didn’t show any particular shock, the boy seemed to have dealt pretty well with whatever the business of that child hanging himself meant to him. We were the ones who were so disturbed.

That he didn’t write that way doesn’t mean he didn’t feel it. Upset, afraid.

But he couldn’t write it to us. Yes. Why.

Children don’t say things outright. They offer some version for grownups to interpret. I know that from when I’m trying to diagnose a child.

Harald lifted his head and his gaze wandered the room, in denial, seeking. One of them — Claudia, himself, that silly self-justifying argument they’d had — both of them had made the covenant with the boy, There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. But he had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him. He had not told them that he loved a man, or at least desired him, explored that emotion, although he had been taught to give expression to his emotions, nonsense that boys don’t cry. He had not told them that he had brought a girl from the water, lived with her in conflict with her embrace of death. He introduced young women for a drink on the terrace of the townhouse; an hour of talk about public events in the city, holidays, politics maybe, exchange of anecdotes and laughter, of opinions of a book both he and his father had read — and they might or might not see the woman again. This one whom he had taken in apparently permanently they had not seen much more of; he would walk in alone, you are always at home to your own son, and sit down to eat with them. Then there would be an old form of intimacy, a recognition between the three of them, you might call it, they would talk together in that privacy of family matters, their experiences in the different worlds of their work, he would tell his mother it concerned him that she worked such long hours and discuss with his father the possibility that he might hive off from the firm in which he was employed and start his own architectural practice more in accordance with his aesthetic directions. Once Harald had asked, You’re in love with this girl, and he had seemed to welcome the admittance coming from without. — I suppose I am.—