Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

— When the party broke up that night and guests left, accompanied by Nkululeko Dladla, David Baker retired to bed in the house and the accused went to the cottage after an altercation with Natalie, who stayed behind, volunteering to assist Jespersen to tidy up and wash dishes.—

He has his audience now. For all those others round the parents and their surrogate son Khulu, here is a drama addressed directly to them. They’ve seen in the flesh some of the characters; up there, on the witness stand. They are invited to share the right of familiarity the judge takes to himself, referring to one of the leading characters in the affair not as he does the men, by their surnames, but simply as ‘Natalie’, because she’s only a woman. If Claudia reads the lips of the man up there on the bench, his patronage is an aside unimportant to her today; or maybe for her it is all the respect from anyone this bitch should expect.

— Some two hours later, the accused wakened in the cottage and found that Natalie had not returned. Concerned for her safety crossing the garden so late, he went to the house, where he came upon Natalie and Jespersen in flagrante delicto, engaged in the sexual act on the sofa in the living-room. They became aware of his presence but he did not confront them. He went back to the cottage. Natalie did not come to the cottage; she took her car and drove away.—

With the daring matter-of-fact of this account his attention has left his audience. His eyes are on his text again; let them contemplate the salacious scene he has just presented.

— The accused, an architect, did not go to work on Friday, January 19th. He stayed in the cottage, alone, all day. Some time between 6.30 and 7 p.m. — he does not recall looking at his watch, and a gardener, the only witness that he went to the house, since he saw him return, does not own a watch — during that period the accused emerged from the cottage, fed his dog, and walked through the garden to the house. There, with the door open to the garden as it had been the night before, Jespersen was lying on the sofa drinking a sundowner. He made light of the incident of the previous night, claiming a shared brotherly context of the sexual mores of the communal household, and suggested that the accused join him with a drink.—

No, no he didn’t feed the dog on the way to the house, that’s the way it’s been phrased to sound but it was to feed the dog, not to go to the house, that he left the cottage! This isn’t just a detail! It may be vital! The judge has let them down, deviated from the trust warily granted him. Claudia and Khulu are aware of a sudden surge of agitation in Harald but do not know its particular source. Claudia turns to Khulu, and he draws his face into planes of troubled assurance: it may be that Harald is momentarily overcome by the totality of where they are, what is actually taking place this day. The gun, that’s what the judge is bringing up now. He, Khulu, has held that gun, flipped it over in his hand, once or twice, yes.

— The house gun, which had been produced as a demonstration model for one of the guests of the previous night who intended to acquire one, had been left lying on a table. With it, the accused shot Jespersen in the head where he lay. The shot was fatal. On his way back to the cottage the accused dropped the gun in the garden, where he was observed by Petrus Ntuli, a plumber’s assistant who worked as a part-time gardener on the property in exchange for accommodation in an outhouse. David Baker and Nkululeko Dladla came home shortly after and found the deceased’s body. They ran to the cottage to tell the accused but there was no response to their calls or knocking on the door, so they presumed he was not there. They called the police who in the course of searching the garden came upon Petrus Ntuli who told them the accused was in the cottage and that he, Ntuli, had seen him drop something on his way to the cottage from the house. The police found the gun, effected entry to the cottage, arrested the accused and took him to the police station for questioning. He was charged with murder. The gun, Exhibit 1, bears his fingerprints. —

These are the facts — but what about the reasons for coming out of the cottage, what about the intention , the dog! The dog!

— None of the facts has been disputed by the Defence. This granted, what the assessors and I have had to decide in handing down judgment is the validity of the claim of temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity submitted by the Defence on behalf of the accused. I cite, exceptionally, ‘on behalf of’ although it goes without saying that any counsel’s chosen defence is proxy for an accused, because in this case the accused has not taken the right to defend himself vociferously.

He denies that he spent Friday in the cottage brooding on revenge against the deceased. He said in evidence ‘Revenge for what. I don’t own either of them, they are free to do as they like’—thus indirectly defending himself against premeditation of his crime, but he does not emphasize the responsibility the couple bore in gross violation of his feelings; he describes his reactions that night as something generated within, by himself, without attribution of blame to them. In reply as to whether he thought of any revengeful accusation, let alone action, against the couple, he said ‘All I could remember — about seeing them there like that — was … a disintegration of everything, disgust with myself, everyone …’

Similarly, he makes no categorical denial, forcefully expressed, of the suggestion that when he walked across the garden to the house on Friday evening, he had the intention of confronting Jespersen. All he offered the court was the oblique statement ‘I found myself in the garden … I didn’t want to talk to anyone … I think then I had to find myself standing again where I stood in the doorway.’ He is referring to the previous night, when he came upon the couple. The Defence has interpreted this statement as standing for his disbelief — that is to say, what he saw in the house that night could not have happened; he had to go back, as if to verify the mise en scène . We unanimously find this interpretation acceptable. The State’s allegation that the accused spent the day of Friday, 19th January, premeditating revenge on the deceased is borne out neither by the content of the accused’s evidence nor the manner of his delivery, which, to those like myself and the assessors, accustomed to the tenor and timbre of lying, have the characteristics of truth.—

A new tension — hope — holds the three. Harald and Claudia stiffen, recklessly afraid to let go, in any contact. It is so unexpected, this show of understanding by one who is judging Duncan, nothing contradictory to be read from the tips — is it at all usual for such empathy with an accused to be expressed in the course of a judgment? How can they know? Can’t ask the one who would: Motsamai, he’s unreachable in the well of the court beside his client. Harald hears Claudia’s fast breathing from a thumping heart. Their son is not mad and he is not a liar. What he says (and his body doesn’t contradict it) has the characteristics of truth. If Motsamai, Hamilton, could relay some answer? — does the truth count? Can the truth save you?

And while these questions take height, they suddenly plummet again. What is the judge delivering himself of now? Motsamai, Hamilton ! — is judgment a one-man game in which the player challenges himself, enjoys shifting conclusions to weigh down first one side of the famous scales, then the other?

— Absence of premeditation, however, does not imply subsequent criminal incapacity in the actual perpetration of a crime, the series of actions by which a crime is committed at the time . If it is accepted that the accused went from the cottage to the house to convince himself that what he saw on the sofa in the living-room the previous nighr actually happened, only to look once again at the scene (the judge seems to lose concentration for a moment, preoccupied wearisomely with some matter surfacing in him from his own life, but perhaps he’s paused for effect, he’s a pro, they’re all pros, his assessors, his prosecution and defence teams) … what he actually saw was the man Jespersen, on that same sofa. There followed convincing evidence, confirmed by both State and Defence psychiatrists’ expert opinions, of a second profound shock, the outrage of Jespersen’s callous assumption that what happened the previous night before the accused’s eyes was trivial, to be passed off over a drink between men.—