Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

But to say that was to be saying love was difficult; there were difficulties. Harald, Claudia should have read that. But there was freedom, his right to his own privacy: their form of love for him.

The covenant meant nothing.

It had been the most important commitment in their lives. Without it all the people whose old age she eased and the men, women and children whose wounds of many kinds she tended, were nothing, and without it all Harald’s love of God was nothing. And if he could have, no, would have come to them, would they have been able to stop in time, what happened? At what stage in the disorder that was taking over his life could that have been done? What — when — was the point before no return ; when the girl was resuscitated — the basic form of ‘saved’—could he have been prevented, protected, from taking on to ‘save’ her in the final sense, in reconciliation to life? While it was obviously the self-destruction that was her dynamo, the very energy itself that attracted him to her?

Or was there a point earlier, predating the girl. They thought — all this often surfaced and was spoken between them — about the homosexual episode. If it was that: an episode. Was that something at which a halt should have been called, was it to be seen, diagnosed, as a beginning of disintegration of a personality — and wasn’t theirs a heterosexual judgment of homosexuality as a ‘disintegration’! If he had told them of that attraction would it have been the right thing to counsel him in a worldly way, suggest that for him it was a matter of the ambience in that house, a fashion, the beguilement of male bonding in a period — his adulthood — and a place where social groupings were in transition. In that house, as the saying goes: no problem, black and white, brothers in bed together.

There could have been that.

But then Harald thought about it alone, at night, and came back to bed to find her awake. Perhaps if we had had a chance, if he could have come to us then — it would have been a mistake to see the Jespersen thing as an episode. Maybe that was the stability for him.

You mean the life in that house. That way.

Yes. Saving the girl: it was an attempt to make himself something he’s not. Someone like us. I don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself wanting to make love to a man. I don’t know whether I would have been wanting to run away from myself. Coming from our sort of background. Maybe he should have stayed with men. That was really for him. If not Jespersen, there would have been someone else and they might have had a better life together in the cottage than the sordid mess he committed himself to with a woman.

She got up out of their bed.

What’re you doing?

Over at the window, she drew back the curtains, it was a night shiny-black as wet coal and a plane making for the airport trailed its own constellation of landing lights up along the stars. The world was witnessing. D’you think that’s what he would have wanted from us?

Get back to bed.

They were closer, coming upon discoveries in one another’s being, than they had been since first they had met, when they were young and in the novelty of perilous human intimacy.

The Constitutional Court has gone into deliberation on the verdict and Harald and Claudia have no information as to how long this may take.

For them, their son has been already on trial — this trial in a court other than the one in which he will appear — and is awaiting a Last Judgment above any that may be within the jurisdiction to be handed down when his own case is heard. Motsamai is sympathetically condescending, reiterating reassurance. — I know you don’t believe me. Ah-hêh … I know what you think: what can I know if the whole question has been argued before the highest authority we have except the President of the country and God Himself, and those judges haven’t been able to come up with a verdict? But it may take them many weeks. My concern for my client does not include any fears about the outcome. What will emerge will be the end of the Death Penalty. My concern is to demonstrate without any doubt that this young man was driven by circumstances to act totally against his own nature. This woman, and the individual who was once more than his friend — the pair betrayed him out of his mind!—

There were other people in trouble waiting to be received by him. He ushered these two to the door of chambers. — Look, I want you to meet my wife, and my son — we’ve applied for medical school for him, I don’t know if he’s got the aptitude, you could give us some good advice, Claudia? What about this Friday evening? I hope you’ll get a good dinner. I’ll be coming back from the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein, so let’s say around eight-thirty, something like that.—

The aplomb glossed urbanely over the sensitivity to their situation; he knew how it was, they would be in retreat from the company of friends whose sympathetic faces served only to set them apart from the basis of old friendship, common circumstances no longer shared. It was not always necessary or desirable to keep the relationship with clients formal. Taking on a brief means establishing the confidence of human feeling, some sort of give-and-take, with the family of the life to be defended, even while retaining professional objectivity. This white couple didn’t have the resilience that blacks have acquired in all their generations of being people in trouble by the nature of their skins. He knows how to handle these two: they’ll feel they’re able to do something for him; that aside about wanting advice on a career for an ambitious son.

When they are in the visitors’ room neither lets surface their preoccupation with the unknown deliberations of the Constitutional Court. It was not the first time they had had to employ this tact; there are so many subjects and reactions that are inappropriate to display to someone living unimaginably, exposed there before you only for a half-hour between two prison warders. The prisoner is a stranger who should not be confronted with what can be dealt with only in the familiarity of freedom. Certainly Duncan knew of the subject of the first sitting of the Constitutional Court; he had access to newspapers but he — also out of tact, it’s a two-way process if it’s to make these visits possible — he does not speak of it either. Or perhaps it is because they could not even begin to comprehend what the proceedings of that Court must have meant to him as he followed reports. A man who declares himself guilty, is he declaring himself ready to die? Or does he, as only he can, know himself in the death cells with Makwanyane and Mchunu, asserting the right to life no matter what he has done?

They ask him instead if he’s able to make progress with the plans he’s drawing and he says yes he is, he is, the work is going well enough.

— It’s pretty remarkable you manage all that. — Harald is admiring; admiration is a form of encouragement that’s admissible.

— The only problem is I don’t get a chance to discuss any difficulty that comes up. With the others at the office, as we generally do. So this really will be all my own work … a bit eccentrically so, who knows.—

— Maybe someone from the firm could come and talk about it with you. Why not. — Harald is prepared to ask the senior partners for this service (if his junior colleague Verster had been the right person Duncan surely would have mentioned him); prison is not a disease, there’s nothing infectious to keep clear of, in this visitors’ room.

— Not worth the trouble. When I’ve finished the draft plan Motsamai will take it out and someone’ll look at it.—

What is really being said here is that he understands that if the Last Judgment is going to be in his favour and will ensure that his life will not end now, it still has to be endured: back to the drawing board. But what that means to him, having once sacrificed the life of order for chaos, is something that cannot be conveyed.