Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

They have lost touch with Khulu. Unfortunately. Just as you lose touch with the one who is shut away from the course of your life long determined, so the circumstances that surrounded the period of crisis in that one’s life produced their own strange intimacies which do not belong with the necessity of taking up daily life as you know how to live it. They haven’t seen Motsamai again. Khulu visits Duncan — Duncan says, or rather this comes out in passing, in the exchange that takes place on a tacit level which avoids certain references and unanswerable questions, between him and his parents when they visit. Exchange of personal news; for Duncan now has his kind of news, he has completed the plan he was working on, a detailed favourable report from fellow architects on the project has come back (virtue of Motsamai’s buddy relations with the prison commandant). Next visit, he can tell that he has permission to start studying for an advanced diploma in town planning. And the following month it is that he is — yes — taking on care of his health by working-out in his cell night and morning. He makes them laugh a little at the idea of his makeshift gym.

He looks well.

If somehow different from the way they carry his image within them, as some people carry a photograph in a wallet as an identification of commitment; his face carved more boldly, roughly, and the tendons showing in the neck of that prison garment those of a man older than twenty-seven. It’s the way, when he was at boarding school, there was a visage, an outline in the mind that was not quite that of the boy they visited at the school; took out for lunch, when there was occasion to talk to him seriously about something.

It occurs to Harald that whenever they leave the prison now it is as it was when they left him at school. The span of time ahead, unthinkable seven years or five years, is telescoped to something by which it can be understood.

He knows that there is the unanswered question in their regard on him every time they visit; needing a response. The judge stated it as a fact, not a question. ‘He has shown no remorse.’ How could they know, any of them, what they have a word for. How could they know what they are thinking, talking about. Harald and Claudia, my poor parents, do you want your little boy to come in tears to say I’m sorry? Will it all be mended, a window I smashed with a ball? Shall I be a civilized human being again, for the one, and will God forgive and cleanse me, for the other. Is that what they think it is, this thing, remorse.

He brought me a book when I was awaiting trial, I think it was when he was so angry, so horrified that he wanted to accuse, punish me, but there was something in it he didn’t, doesn’t, never can know. The passage about the one who did it and the one to whom it was done. ‘It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together — as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, the one acting, the other suffering him — share a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other.’

Writers are dangerous people. How is it that a writer knows these things? Only that this time it is the three of us, alone together. In the ‘human relationship’—love-making and all the rest — Carl acted, I suffered him, I acted, Natalie suffered me, and that night on the sofa they acted and I suffered them both. We belong to each other.

I’ve copied that quotation again and again, don’t know how many times, in the middle of the night from memory I’ve written it on a scrap of paper the way she used to scribble a line for a poem, I’ve stopped in the middle of a section, when I was concentrating on my plan, and had to write it out somewhere. He’s dead, and he and she and I share a secret that binds us forever together. You couldn’t put it better than that; he’s dead, I somehow took up the gun and shot him in the head. There’s another passage in that book; about the one who does it. ‘He has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’ When I found them like that, my deepest desire — what was it? If only I knew what it was I wanted, of what I saw was their betrayal or consummation of us three, and if because I couldn’t have whatever it was I wanted, my deepest desire was gratified when I shot my lover and her lover. He’s dead, I’m alive, rejoicing with all of them — my parents, Motsamai — that there’s no Death Penalty any more. The murderer has outlived the murdered. Try and tell this to my judges, the one in court and the ones in the townhouse. It cannot be told, only be lived, in this walled space made for it. What’s outside, what I can see from the Tantalus window when I stand on the bed — out there, after seven years (five, Motsamai promises), will it be put behind me, will the one who is dead and I not belong to each other still. I should ask an old lag that; we didn’t move in the circle of criminals, in the house and the cottage. So many things we didn’t know, never should have needed to know. The three of us, Carl, dead, Natalie and I alive, Nastasya my victim and, as Khulu says, Natalie my torturer, wherever she is, in what I’ve done we’re bound together, whether she ever knows it or not, whether or not what she has in her womb is another secret.

The CD player is stored at the townhouse with other things. No music in these nights between these days of my seven years. The narrow aperture of the window keeps surveillance while the Judas eye in the door is shut; what disciple of functional architecture thought up specification for that lozenge of a window which divides so satisfyingly into segments made by vertical bars. The night cut in five pieces.

No player yet there are passages I’m hearing over and over, the adagio movement from Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ and the allegretto of a Schubert impromptu. He and I used to go to concerts in that time, the L’Agulhas time. With him there was more than Brubeck and who was the other jazz man. The deceased had a collection of recordings, Penderecki and Stockhausen, too. Listening to music that is formed in your own head, is there without any agency of reproduction — how? how? — through the hours you begin to know what music is. It’s one of the ways — only one of the ways — in which order can be selected, put together, out of the original chaos. With her, I listened to this Beethoven and Schubert for my ears alone, through headphones; it’s a bit like that now. She didn’t want to listen; I see it wasn’t because she needed to be tutored in appreciation etc., by me. It was because she was in rebellion against the principle of order; in anything, everything, that’s why she never finished the poems.

There has to be a way.

Of course, if I were to ‘confess’ all this to Motsamai he’d get busy with grounds of remorse and maybe even succeed — he’s a wizard in his devotion to his clients — in getting an earlier remission than he’s conned me to count on. But then all this that I live would be taken away from me; I couldn’t endure, without it, this space made for it.

The Last Judgment of the Constitutional Court has declared the Death Penalty unconstitutional. The firm and gentle tone of the Judge President has the confidence of a man who while he is conveying the ruling arrived at after several months of weighing scrupulously the findings of a bench of independent thinkers, himself has been given grace. There is a serenity in justice.

If the decision had been for the State, once again, to have the right to take a life for a life, it would have been too late to decree that Duncan should be hanged one early morning in Pretoria. He was already secured by his sentence: seven years. Yet the news sets her visibly trembling; he takes her two hands to steady her; and himself. The ultimate sentence held off by a moratorium was the threat that it still existed; on the Statute Book, even Motsamai had said. And while it still existed it would always have been what, for their son’s act one Friday night, could have been exacted. So it is release, relief, a curious trace, like happiness; how strange that it should be possible to feel anything like this. Duncan is still where he is.