Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Not all in the visitors’ seats are voyeurs. There are Duncan’s friends. Some unexpected friends they did not know; what a secretive person he was — with them, his parents. A mother and daughter — women with a lot of hair who look like two versions of the same woman some years apart. Jewish probably. Duncan had Jewish and black friends Harald and Claudia did not have; he had moved on. The two women came up and gave their names. The younger version was saying, For me it’s as if it’s happening to my brother, but the elder’s voice elbowed hers out of the way, speaking in French, Nous sommes tous créatures mêlées d’amour et du mal. Tous.

Claudia thanked them for coming; there is a form for everything, it occurs to you unbidden.

What was that.

Claudia fingered distractedly back through school French. Something like us being creatures mixed of love and evil, all of us. I don’t quite see what she was getting at.

But Harald did.

Others approached, shook the parents’ hands, but none knew what to say as that foreign woman had, whoever she was: a messenger. And the other messenger was there. He stood distressed, forever guilty as the one who had brought, a curse he could not discard like a gun, on the way, the news that Friday evening that something terrible had happened.

Now what Hamilton had prepared them for was being enacted. Duncan was in the well of the court wearing a wide-striped shirt and red tie with grey pants and one of those outsize linen jackets young men choose these days — the nearest Motsamai will have been able to get him to wear a suit like Motsamai’s elegant own, Duncan probably didn’t own a suit. An appearance consistent with the moral world the judge and his chosen assessors occupy — the accused’s mother and father paid close attention to the outfit and what it implied about the gaunt man on his throne. An urbane judge — Hamilton had said in the hinting tone of satisfaction. Up there, the only distinguishing feature of the man in his crimson robe was round ears standing out alertly from his skull. Was the convention of dress Duncan presented something acceptable to a worldly judge who would not associate moral standards with a suit; did it matter what a man wore when whatever his clothes might say about him, he killed. The voice of a functionary — the judge’s clerk — confirms Duncan’s identity in this place, for this reason.

— Are you Duncan Peter Lindgard?—

— Yes.—

— You are charged with a crime of murder, in that you wrongfully and maliciously killed, on January 19th, 1996, Carl Jespersen. How do you plead?—

As on that Friday night in the townhouse when the messenger made his pronouncement, everything has come to a stop; held by Duncan’s profile, his presence. But the moment is broken into by Hamilton Motsamai, Senior Counsel for the Defence. He has swiftly risen. — M’Lord, in view of the nature of the accused’s defence, would M’Lord allow me to enter a plea on my client’s behalf? The plea is not guilty. The nature of the defence, M’Lord, will become apparent during my cross examination of the Prosecution’s first witness, whom my Learned Friend for the State has identified to me.—

The judge has nodded assent.

All about was the movement of people shifting closer to make place for more to be seated, but by now everyone has realized which couple is the parents; no-one presses up against them in the row where they sit.

The girl materializes; the one. She was the one on the sofa with her pants down, who may be seen: the other is out of reach of anyone’s gaze, underground along with all the others who are knifed or strangled or shot in the violence that is the city’s, the way of death. Three more were killed in rivalry between minibus taxi owners at a rank round the corner this morning. But Duncan, when he was awaiting trial, had been wrong when he thought that what happened to him would be lost in random violence and of no public interest. It is the street killings that are of no interest, happening every day.

There she is. The one. There are women who have days when they are ugly and days when they are beautiful. It may have something to do with a number of things: digestion, stage of biological cycle, and the mood of the way they wish to present themselves. She has on her a beautiful day. Claudia was not surprised at the aspect presented; she knew, from her medical practice, how the neurotic personality likes an audience, any audience, even one that can picture her with her legs apart on the sofa. Harald saw her for the first time as Duncan must always have seen her, his definitive image, even on her ugly days; the lovely soft skin indented, the twist of a chisel on a statue, to the curl of the lip at either side of the mouth, the rosy-buffed high forehead under stringy wisps of fringe, the lazy, intense pupils of eyes within a disguise of childish turn-down at the outer corners where the thicket of lashes met, the clothes that hid and suggested her body, modest flowing skirt that slid hack and forth across the divide of her buttocks as she walked to the witness stand, cossack blouse whose gauzy amplitude fell from the Modigliani shoulders and touched upon the points of meagre breasts. She is not a beauty but she has beauty at her command. And to be looking at her is to see that the design of her face is one that can transform into something menacing. Ugly days. When she entered the well of the court it was difficult to make out whether she avoided finding Duncan; suddenly — Harald saw — from the stand she was looking straight at Duncan, perfectly still and concentrated; and would Duncan reply for her, as she drew it from him: Here I am . Would he! Harald could not see, could not see Duncan’s eyes and, wildly agitated, scarcely knew how to contain this — imagined — male empathy with his son.

He felt an animus towards the Prosecutor the moment the man rose. It was a physical sense along his skin. The Prosecutor had the lugubrious high-arched brows and the elliptical wide mouth of the comedian that also may become the glaring face of the samurai. Wearing the endearing version of his features, he led his evidence in chief.

— You lived, as lovers, with Duncan Lindgard?—

— Yes.—

— How long had this relationship existed?—

— About a year and a half.—

— Were you happy together?—

She smiled, bunched lips and made an odd gesture that was the only sign of nerves evident in her — passed bent fingers lightly down the skin of her throat, as if to claw at herself. — Hardly that. Well, occasionally. Between all the other times.—

— Why was the relationship you both had chosen not a happy one?—

— Choose. I didn’t choose.—

— How was that?—

— He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.—

— Could you explain to the court what that means?—

— I had drowned and would have been dead if he hadn’t done it.—

— You had got into difficulties while going for a swim?—

— I walked out into the sea.—

— It was your intention to drown.—

— That’s right.—

The assembly is thrilled by this grand laconic recklessness towards the precious possession of life itself. Harald and Claudia can feel that the people around them already have fallen in love with this girl, their faces turned on her are capitulating: Here I am.

— Weren’t you glad to be alive, after all?—

— He wanted me to be. That was nice.—

— So why were you not happy, grateful?—

— He wanted me to be glad his way, to forget why I had made my decision that time, everything I hadn’t been able to deal with, as if it had disappeared. Pumped out of my lungs with the seawater, basta, a new Natalie. According to plan. He’s an architect, that’s all he knows — making plans, a plan for somebody’s life according to his specifications. Not mine. He found careers I ought to have, even attitudes. Nothing was mine.—