Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

Counsel knows the devastating emotions relatives and the newly-convicted are subject to when they meet for the first time, which is a new time, after it is all over. Hamilton has to control his empathy, which exists along with his professional satisfaction in an extremely dubious case well defended by one of the best advocates available. He is there to support, to help them accept in themselves, between themselves and himself, the natural expression of emotions. Among his people (he would term it, in our culture) a mother would be wailing. And how. Why not. But these poor people — that little bitch was right in this instance — middleclass whites whose codes of behaviour they are sure are enlightened and free, are the ones that can contain everything in life and so should, in respect of everybody! Their son, poor boy, got himself into a mess that wasn’t covered. And they themselves don’t know what it is to respond to what is happening to them now. They show no emotion, just a distanced kindness towards one another.

No wailing from this mother. It is only — unexpectedly — the father who suddenly gets up from the chair he has been considerately offered and takes his son by the shoulders. A curious ugly sound between a cough and a cry, as if he were gagging comes from him. His wife the doctor seems able to make no move. Hamilton lets him alone in this, his moment. Only when he’s turned away, his face in a dry rictus, does Hamilton go over and put an arm around him.

Harald had looked at Duncan in his calculatedly casual-fitting jacket and baggy grey trousers, the convention of unconventionality that had not prejudiced a worldly judge, and realized this was the last time he would be wearing these. Next time (and time is seven years) it would be prison clothes.

Over.

It’s beginning.

Khulu was waiting for them on the steps of the courts. He walked with them in silence towards the parking lot. They tramp like prisoners, every footstep grinds. Motsamai’s — Hamilton’s task was successfully concluded now, he would be the go-between of Duncan and the prison authorities, but there would be little need for him to seek out or receive the parents, a successful Senior Counsel is a busy man. They stood a moment, delivered to their car. Claudia spoke for them both, to Khulu — Let’s not lose sight of each other.

Aprison is darkness. Inside. Inside self. It’s a night that never ends, even under the strip light’s bristling glare from the cell ceiling. Darkness even while, through the barred window reached by standing on the bed: the city trembling with light. That’s anticipation. That’s what’s gone. There is nothing calling, nothing you are waiting for.

I am a rag on a barbed wire fence. You should have left me there.

A letter from Natalie?

I am a rag

on a barbed wire fence

You

should have left me there

No — no such thing as a letter from her; something she once wrote. One of the scraps she would leave for him to find anywhere at all, on the dashboard shelf of the car, beside the tub in the bathroom. Her affectation; her communication.

She could have been a writer. Her candle flame. Could have been the writer, the architect, the ‘creative’ couple. The family foursome, how satisfactory: along with the doctor and the provider of housing loans for the homeless. Affordable —there’s that word coined for our time, for what you can get out of it without going too far for safety, good old Khulu’s way to acceptance: he’s affordable by white males, in their beds.

She could have been a writer. To have put her to work in an advertising agency, inventing jingling fashionable lies to make people buy things they must be persuaded, brain-washed to need, want — this was the betrayal of that possibility. She showed contempt for my choice by doing something outrageous instead of using words against me because I’d debased words , for her, finally. I’d shut her up.

It wasn’t her, it was him I shut up finally.

Always trying to win her round by bolstering her confidence in herself (that was it) imagining that by praising, always telling her how intelligent she is—

She laughed: How do you measure your dog’s intelligence? By how it obeys commands!

The city’s body-smell of urine and street-stall flowers. Not yet winter. Not even autumn quite passed, up at the window.

Jagged end.

What’s that. Not something of hers, again. No.

Jagged end of a continent.

L’Agulhas.

It was with Carl, there. The sea shimmering into the shallows as the tide rose; rocks (L’Agulhas, ‘the needles’ in Portuguese, he explains, the Northerner who amuses himself by teaching the Southerner what he ought to know about his own country). The rocks bloodied in lichen. It was exciting, the two of them with the weight and distance of the continent behind them, sitting on the edge of existence there. They are only just out of reach of the heaving anger of the two oceans as the powers of opposing currents clash, Indian and Atlantic. With her — oh it was another place, the Indian alone from which she was dragged back to breathe. At the Atlantic it was with him. Where the two oceans meet, it’s fatal. With Carl, come to the end of it all. When that happened someone picked up the gun and shot him in the head.

Jagged end.

Those who want an eye for an eye, a murderer for a murderer; they won’t put it behind him. Harald does not know whether in this conviction, of which Claudia is probably and mercifully ignorant, he should offer: Perhaps he could go and practise in another country.

Out of something terrible something new, to be lived with in a different way, surely, than life was before? This is the country for themselves, here, now. For Harald a new relation with his God, the God of the suffering he could not have had access to, before. Claudia — she came out with something that plunged him into the disorientation within her, which he had not realized.

Perhaps we should try for a child.

That she should allow herself to turn to this illusion, a doctor, forty-seven years old … what hope could there be of conception, another Duncan, in her body.

I’m not menopausal yet.

He was tumescent with her pain, he made love to her anyway, for the impossibility. It was the first time since the messenger entered the townhouse and it was unlike any love-making they had experienced ever before in their life together, a ritual neither believed in, performed in bereaved passion.

The first months moved past them. Then old routines began to draw them along, in a return: the old contacts of every day, the context of responsibilities, faces, documents, decisions affecting others, whether to prescribe this or that antidote for someone else’s kind of pain, whether the rise in bank rates could be contained without raising the monthly payments on housing loans, decisions in which a man dead on a sofa, a trial, seven or five years, had no relevance. Nothing else for it; nothing else for them. Only, in place of the usual leisure activities, the visits, the drive out of town is to another city, where long-term sentences are served.

A business colleague invites Harald to lunch. The man has just recovered from double bypass surgery on a heart blocked by thickened blood, and he eats all the richest choices on the menu. It seems to have been some kind of demonstration; he says, smiling, for Harald — You have to die. — It’s a delicate way of referring to and offering consolation for disaster, all suffer it one way or another, we’re all people in trouble.

Harald and Claudia are taken up again in their own circle, no reason to keep contact with that communal household, that cottage no doubt occupied by new tenants. Baker, in whose bedroom in the house the gun was supposed to be out of reach, hardly could be expected to face in that living-room the parents of his lover’s murderer, even if they could have brought themselves to be there. And Claudia had never entered the cottage after the messenger had told what he had to tell. The personal belongings of the previous tenant have been removed to the townhouse by a professional firm. Apparently as a mark of consideration, fellow occupants of the townhouse complex have not complained to Harald and Claudia that the continued presence of the dog is against the rules.