Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— So there was no particular provocation that perhaps led to your behaviour that night?—

She paused, slight movements of her head and twitch of lips in puzzled innocence. Her reactions, calculated or not, were inexplicably contradicted by her words, as if someone else spoke out of her. — I don’t do what I do because someone provokes me.—

It was while they were continuing in this way, the rally of his questions and her answers that he was enduring with the undeflected patience of professionalism, sure of her faltering to his advantage in the end, that she simply let drop the subject of the exchange, and made a remark as if reminded of something that might not be of interest to him.

— By the way, I’m pregnant.—

If she expected some sudden reaction she should have known better. Counsel conceals all irritation and anger in court — a discipline that serves to control the reception of any unforeseen statement. The art is to be quick in deciding how to use it. He nudged his back against the support of his chair. Ah-hêh. And simply asked another question.

— Is the child Duncan’s?—

She smiled at the accusation behind the question.

— It doesn’t matter.—

— Natalie … why doesn’t it matter? — He tries the fatherly approach.

— Because then they won’t be able to make any claim. It could be from that night, couldn’t it. They won’t claim.—

— What d’you mean, they won’t claim?—

— They’d want something of him. If something terrible happens to him.—

— The Death Penalty is going to be abolished, my dear. Duncan will go to prison and he will come out. Surely, for yourself, it must matter whose child it is you’re going to have. You must know, don’t you? You do know.—

— We made love — Duncan — that morning before we went to work, it was all in the same twenty-four hours. So who can say. It doesn’t matter.—

— No? You don’t care?—

Oh she is in charge, she is in charge. — I do care; it’s going to be my child, that’s who it is, mine.—

It was Counsel’s task — everything was his task, no wonder his wife complained that he had little attention to give at home in the fine house he had provided — his task to tell his client and the parents what might or might not be a new element in their life as people in trouble.

On their next half-hour in the visitors’ room Harald referred to it as a fact, without mention of any circumstances the girl related. — Hamilton has told us Natalie James is expecting a baby.—

Duncan faced them kindly, as if looking back at something from afar. — That’s good for her.—

Do you love her .

I suppose so .

And now.

Change the subject.

Claudia is talking to him of other things, she’s telling him what a nice boy Sechaba Motsamai is to have around helping at the clinic on Wednesdays, Claudia is able to feel herself close to her son, these last days before the trial, she looks forward to the visitors’ room, now, they’ve found the communication is there, all along, in just seeing each other between the barriers of the unspeakable.

Harald hears their voices and does not follow.

I suppose so .

He and Claudia will never know what it was that happened. What happened to their son.

Claudia wanted to go to the visitors’ room the day before the trial began. During the morning Harald abruptly left his office, passed his secretary’s careful absorption at her computer (she knows, she knows, there’s something that emanates from people when they are about the business of their trouble); down in the lift where employees whose names they’re aware he does not recall greet the executive member of the Board as a sign of loyalty to the firm that feeds them; is saluted in the building’s basement carpark by the security guard in paramilitary uniform, and arrives unannounced at chambers. Hamilton Motsamai is in conference with another client but when his secretary — she knows, she knows the trial starts tomorrow — informs him on the intercom he excuses himself to the client and comes to Harald. Nobody’s need is greater than Harald’s; Motsamai’s hand is outstretched, his mouth still is parted with the words he was speaking when he left his office, the switch of attention from one set of people in trouble to another is in his face as a slide projector flicks one transparency away for another to drop into view. Motsamai’s face has been formed by this succession; whatever his clients pay him for, however high his fees, they leave, like initials scratched into the living bark of a tree, their anguish on the surface of his facial expression; his strength, confidence and pride wear it as a palimpsest upon him. He and Harald go into an anteroom full of files and boxes. Motsamai’s tongue moves back and forth along the teeth of his lower jaw, bulging under the membrane of the lip, his wisp of beard lifts, as he listens to Harald: no, no. — Much better if you stay away. I’ll see him, I’ll be with him this afternoon. He’s prepared himself, nothing should be allowed to disturb that. His mother, no — you know, that can only get him thinking how he’s got to face you from the dock again tomorrow. He’ll be all right. He’s fine, he’s in control.—

Harald sits in his car. The key is in the ignition. A beggar sprawled against a shopfront is clawing bread from a half-loaf and stuffing it into his mouth. Mama traders call and argue among pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Rotting cabbage leaves adrift in the gutter; life pullulating in one way or another. People cross the windscreen as darkness overtaking light. Is Duncan afraid, the day before the trial?

Duncan is not afraid. Nothing could be more terrifying than that Friday night.

There is a face at the window. It’s the familiar face, the city’s face of a street boy: Harald has forgotten to give him his handout for having whistled and gestured the availability of this parkingbay when he arrived. He lowers the window. The boy has his gluesniffer’s plastic bottle half-stuffed under the neck of the garment he’s wearing, his black skin is yellowed, like a sick plant. What’s left of his intelligence darts quickly at the coin, his survival is to see at a glance if it is enough.

The exaltation of putting a face to everything denied me.

By both of them joined like rutting dogs on the sofa. The exaltation — so that is what violence is, street violence. I know it, I am of it , now. How it comes to you because there is nothing else.

It comes back to me through the hours with the two psychiatrists with their carefully arranged patient faces — how difficult for us humans to concoct an expression empty of judgment: that’s idiocy, or arrogance, superhuman — but they couldn’t get it out of me. Comprehend. Not Motsamai, either. And the court will not. No-one.

That face. His face. Bra.

Only she knows why I could do it. It was something made possible in me by her.

The courtroom is a present so intense it is eternity; all that has passed since that Friday night is made one in it, there is nothing conceivable after it.

There are many to bear witness. Not in the empty stand in the well of the court; all around Harald and Claudia. A murder trial, out of the common criminal class, with a privileged son in the professions accused of murder has provided the Sunday papers with a story of a ‘love triangle’ calling up not only readers’ concupiscence but also some shallow-buried prejudices: the milieu is described as a ‘commune’, ‘a pad’ where blacks and whites, ‘gay and straight’, live together, and there have been photographs somehow got hold of — large ones of Natalie James and the reproduction of an itinerant photographer’s nightclub group in which Carl Jespersen appears with Khulu. All around: the curious, who may or may not be able to identify the parents. Within the whispering, shuffle and creak, they are not obvious among strangers; as for themselves, theirs is a single identity they now have that years of marriage never achieved. There is only this court, this time, this existence, mother/father.