Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Harald’s neighbour turned to his ear against the volume of laughter and music. — But you don’t know how he takes everyone’s troubles, doesn’t forget them. I’m telling you the truth. Although he’s a big man today. Helps many who don’t pay him. We were kids together in Alex.—

The professor was holding the beauty, Motsamai’s daughter, by the elbow. — Did you meet this niece of mine, Motshiditsi?—

She laughed as with long-suffering indulgence. — Ntate, who can pronounce that mouthful. I’m Tshidi, that’s enough. But Mr Lindgard and I have already met.—

— She’s my protégée. I saw her potential when she was this high and asking questions we dignified savants in the family couldn’t answer.—

He says what’s expected of him. — And she’s fulfilled what you saw.—

— Well, let me tell you she started off shrewdly by being bom at the right time, growing up at the right time. That’s the aleatory factor that counts most for us! Her father and I belong to the generation that was educated at missionary school, St. Peter’s, no less … Fort Hare. So we were equipped ahead of our time to take our place eventually in the new South Africa that needs us. Then came the generation subjected to that system euphemistically called education, ‘Bantu education’. They were equipped to be messengers, cleaners and nannies. Her generation came next — some of them could have admission to private schools, to universities, study overseas; they completed a real education equipped just in time to take up planning, administering our country. That’s the story. She’s going to outshine even her father.—

— You’re a lawyer, too.—

— I’m an agricultural economist at the Land Bank.—

— Oh that’s interesting … there are things that are unclear to me, in the process of providing loans for housing — although our field is urban, of course, the same kind of problems in principle must come up in the transformation I understand is taking place at the Bank.—

This young woman is too confident to feel a need to make him acknowledge any further her competence to answer, he’s passed the test, he’s placed himself on the receiving end of their exchange.

— In principle, yes. But the agricultural sector was not only integrated broadly into the financial establishment, through apartheid marketing structures, the Maize Board and so on — in fact in many ways it could afford to be independent of it — the Land Bank was there for them, essentially a politically-based resource for the underwriting of white farmers. The government, through the Bank, provided loans which were never expected to be paid back. The agricultural community, by definition white, because blacks were not allowed to own land, they weren’t even statistics in the deal — the white farmers were expected to make good only in terms of political loyalty coming from an important constituency.—

— And now this is changing.—

— Changing!—

— How d’you see it’s going to happen?—

He has only half her attention for a moment — she has caught the eye of, and makes a discreet signal with a red-nailed hand graceful as a wing to, someone across the room.

— By making it happen. New criteria for raising loans. Small grants to broaden the base of the sector, instead of huge grants to the few: all those who didn’t really have to worry whether their crops grew or not. You could always be bailed out by the Land Bank.—

— No more automatic compensation if the crop fails?—

— Fails? That means there’s been poor farming.—

— Natural disaster? Floods, drought?—

— Ah, failure may be compensated for; it won’t be rewarded. — She laughs with him at her own brusqueness.

— Excuse me — someone’s calling for me. We must talk about these things again, Mr Lindgard. The housing aspect, from you … — She has her father’s beguiling flash of warmth; the dop of brandy.

Motsamai’s children — at last, they too have professions; economists, prospective doctors, and lawyers and architects, God knows, there are other children of his in the room. Their grandfathers and fathers having survived so much, does this mean they’re safe; these will not bring down upon themselves something terrible.

Where was Claudia?

Claudia was dancing. Someone had replaced the children’s rock and rap with music of the Sixties, changing the rhythm of the room, and he followed the familiar, forgotten twists and pauses of her body, the skilful angles of her feet in response to her partner’s as if the arms and thighs and feet of the man were his own. Where is the past. Obliterated by the present; able to obliterate the present. What brought Claudia out among the dancers, was it a heavy, downcast woman who had been sitting alone, who now danced by herself in self-possession, stomping out on swollen legs the burdens within her? Or was it the music that was the metronome beat of student days when she boasted to her friends with excitement and bravado that she was pregnant, his happy wild love-making with her had evaded the precautions of the know-all young doctor-to-be. Or was it Hamilton’s libations. Or all these at once. Claudia had been found by a man who came from a different experience in every other way but this one: the music, its expression in body and feet, of the Sixties, it didn’t matter where he had performed its rituals in shebeens and yards, and she had carried them out in student union halls, they assumed the form of an assertion of life that was hidden in each. The impromptu straggle of dancers wove about in relation to one another with the unconscious volition of atoms; she disappeared and reappeared with her man — or was this a new partner — and passing near, lifted a hand in a small flutter of greeting. When they drove home she did not say, Why didn’t you dance with me, although he was asking it himself. He had had only to go over and take her hand, his body, too, knew that music which did not, like César Franck, reach into the wrong places. Remarks surfaced here and there, between them — Hamilton’s family connections: who was what? — impressions of the house, whom might it have belonged to originally; giggles at what the first owners would think of how it was inherited outside their dynasty now; at home, they shed clothes and were asleep in mid-sentence.

In the morning Claudia stood, dressed, in the doorway. You know I was drunk last night.

I knew. God bless Hamilton.

It wasn’t a manner of speaking; coming from Harald.

When the girl failed to arrive on the appointed day on two occasions, Senior Counsel Motsamai took over the telephone call made by his secretary for the third one and made clear to Ms Natalie James that she was expected without fail. This time she came, and sat herself down on one of the chairs facing the broad and deep moat of desk without waiting for the formality of his inviting her to do so. She was in charge: he read. For his taste, he did not regard her as beautiful, but he could feel how her manner of confrontation, distancing and beckoning at the same time — those yellow-streaked dark eyes with the pin-point gaze of creatures of prey which fix on you steadily without deigning to see you — was a strong attraction: male reaction to which was, Here I am .

Here he was; but he was in charge, in the chambers of the law. He had his notes before him. He went over with her once more the events of the Thursday evening in January. She had the ability, unusual in his experience of witnesses, of repeating exactly, word for word, the replies she had given before. There were no interstices to be taken advantage of in the text of testimony she had edited for herself. She and Duncan had not quarrelled — not that day, though they often did.