Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— Has Motsamai said anything to you about what you might expect? — Claudia says this because she can’t believe there really will be a verdict this afternoon and then a sentence passed next morning, the judge and his assessors will settle themselves into their chairs again and she will hear it.

— Yes, we’ve talked. I hope he has, to you and Dad as well.—

Harald answered. — He has. But of course, it’s only what he thinks, I mean from some precedent. All the time, no sign of what the judge was concluding about anything, even when he interrupted, asked something, or objected to something — I tried to make out whether he was impressed, disbelieving, whatever. But they’re past masters at the neutral voice and the expressionless face.—

— Like the deadpan of a tough negotiator you’re used to in the Board Room, Dad.—

He forces them to smile.

— Khulu sends his greetings — a message. You have it, Harald?—

Harald has written, at Khulu’s dictation, on a page torn from the back of the notebook: UNGEKE UDLIWE UMZWANGEDWA SISEKHONA. He gives the piece of paper to Duncan.

— Do you understand?—

— The gist. I’ve picked up a bit of Zulu from him.—

— What does it mean? You know he’s been with us nearly all the time.—

He doesn’t answer his mother at once, not because he is unsure of the translation but because what it is, is hard to speak out in this hour, between the three of them.

— Something like, you will never be alone because we are alone without you.—

It’s been said for them, the parents, there is nothing more to be said. They clung to the rest of their precious time with their son, talking a surface made of matters meaningless to all three, which could at least hold above sheer fall.

When it was time for the judge to convene the afternoon sitting of the court, one of the warders, a young Afrikaner, led them, and turned to regard Duncan. — He should eat something, lady. It’s no good on an empty stummick. Your mother wants you to eat something, man.—

There has been, there is, no silence like the silence in a court when the judge lifts his head to hand down judgment. All other communication, within and without, is stilled; all is ended.

This is the last word.

She sits with hands trapped under her thighs as if in recognition of the irritation he has endured in being aware, in this place, the past days, of her beside him constantly turning the nail of her thumb under the rim of each nail. Khulu is with them. Khulu sits at her other side.

And darkness fell upon the land.

Each of the three is in the state of intense concentration that, as he, her husband, once tried to explain to her, was Simone Weil’s definition of prayer. He doesn’t know if he’s praying; there is doubt about everything for him. What is habit praying for now — twelve years could be the maximum, ten likely, Hamilton says seven, eight is the leniency expected — it’s implied — as the triumph of the Defence.

He/she. They don’t look at their son now. There is no gaze able to reach him; the well of the court is not only the measure that sets him apart, in this enclosure within what everyone else experiences of the world — his progenitors, friends, the messenger Verster, the woman who knows we are all creatures of love and evil, are among them. Even Motsamai has done with him; whatever the bond was, the succour nobody, nobody else could give, it soon shall belong to the next client.

A judge takes his time. There must be nothing precipitate about the law. Twelve years, if it is to be twelve years, there is no hurry to decide a verdict on what will take so long to serve.

Does a sentence begin from the moment the verdict is pronounced, like the striking of a clock that signals a new hour to commence — My Lord Jesus Christ! — how demeaning it has been, all along, to be content to be an ignoramus, apparently immune from contact with the secular processes of crime and punishment! Only to have understood sins to be absolved by one of Your servants, mornings at confession. With great effort, he touches her arm and her hand comes out from suppression beneath the weight of her body so that he takes it. She has released the other hand, too. He is aware of Khulu’s slight side-glance on him, on her. He sees Khulu’s hand take this other hand.

The judge is feeling for something in the recesses of his robes; it was a handkerchief. The judge blows his nose, working the cloth up into one nostril, wipes the comers of his lips, replaces the handkerchief.

The judge looks out once, over the assembly, and then begins to address himself.

— The accused, Duncan Peter Lindgard, is charged with murder, arising out of the killing of Carl Jespersen, a fellow resident on a communally-occupied property. The accused’s plea of not guilty is based on the defence of lack of criminal capacity, defined as temporary non-pathological incapacity.—

Our son is not mad.

— An accused person who submits non-pathological causes in support of a defence of criminal incapacity is required to lay a factual foundation sufficient for the court to decide the issue of the accused’s criminal responsibility for his actions having regard to the expert evidence and to all the facts of the case, including the nature of the accused’s actions during the period relevant to the alleged crime.

The defence to the charges is that owing to extreme stress and provocation he had been unable to form the intention required to commit the alleged crime; unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions or act in accordance with such appreciation, and unable to engage in any purposeful conduct.—

There is something salutary, necessary, for Harald and Claudia, perhaps even for their son himself, in this plain setting out of facts that, within themselves, have been so overgrown by emotion and entangled out of comprehension by distress.

— The main events of the night of Thursday, January 18th, 1996, have been proved by evidence which is either common cause or not seriously disputed. A party took place with the arrival of friends of the occupants of the main house on the property, David Baker, Nkululeko Dladla, Carl Jespersen, and the occupants of the cottage on the property, Natalie James and the accused. The accused and Natalie cohabited as heterosexual lovers, the three men in the house were homosexuals, with Baker and Jespersen as a couple. Before his relationship with Natalie, the accused had had a homosexual relationship with Jespersen, but this does not appear to have affected the close friendship, the amicable sharing of what was virtually a single household by the five individuals.—

And as he delivers the next statement the judge looks up, head lifted, straight out to the public assembly, for the first time.

— They even owned and knew how to use, a gun, in common. —

It is also a first hint of any personal attitude to the case. The context of the case. He has allowed himself the show of a brief ironic comment for those, like the father of the accused, who are sophisticated enough to interpret it as a shrug of disapproval of the household he has, dispassionately, and without prejudice on sexual mores, described. The significance of the shared gun (‘they even’) as a symbol of the shared interchangeable relations there distracts Harald as something he should have gone into, wanted to all along but that can’t be attended to now, no no, because every phrase that comes from this man is selective progress in the discourse of judgment, you must keep up with him, read between the lines (read his lips, of their intent) at the same time as you miss no single word. Harald wants to convey to Claudia and Khulu this attitude he sees purposely let slip by the judge, but there’s no time even to alert them with a glance.