Gordimer Nadine - The House Gun

This is a matter between them, the three in the townhouse. They part that night with the intimacy of court days restored.

Khulu Dladla has his own knowledge that this couple to whom the fact that he’s black and gay doesn’t preclude his being, to them, like a son — well, they’re white, after all, and what they’re appalled by is that they might be expected to prove themselves as parents to their own son by taking in the kid, themselves. As if — with his people — this would need a second’s thought! Children belong, never mind any doubts about their origin, in the family.

There was no conception for a forty-seven-year-old. But there is a child.

It is provided for through the offices of Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai’s chambers; the one condition Harald and Claudia took courage to insist, with Duncan, was that arrangements should be made by Hamilton, and not in personal contact with them. Duncan doesn’t demur, let it be as they like, he smiles as if leaving his father, fellow reader, to choose books for him, and he doesn’t offer any expression of gratitude, either. Everything is suddenly simple between them; why? Harald wonders whether he has been seeing her, Natalie/Nastasya has her visiting days at the prison? Or she’s written letters, her poems. One can’t ask. But he’s been able to come to them, his parents, with anything at all, even this matter of the child. They’re there for him.

Perhaps in time — even five years is long — they’ll see the child; Hamilton is confident, as always: he’ll get round her just as he led her to condemn herself out of her own mouth under cross examination, he’ll arrange what he calls access. Get to know the small boy. Have him at the townhouse, watch him play with the dog.

And Duncan?

Duncan has been granted permission to work in the prison library as well as pursue his studies in his cell. It is not much of a library, in terms of the kind of books that he and Harald have a need to read; the works that are dangerous and indispensable, revealing to you what you are. It’s not much used. The long-term prisoners who occupy cells adjoining his are mostly men for whom life has been action not contemplation; in violence, his and theirs, is the escape from self. When you kill the other you are trying to kill the self that plagues your existence. Then only the brute remains to live on, caged: most of them are terrible, filled with mumbling hate, dangling fists clutched to strike again, such hands can’t take up these frail objects, binding and paper, that could offer them the only freedom there is, behind these walls.

Who on earth is it who decides what should and should not be suitable for criminals to read, presumably on the criterion that there shall be nothing to rouse the passions that have already raged and destroyed? Rehabilitation. Plenty of religious stuff; as if religion has never roused murderous passion, and is not doing so again, outside the walls. Self-improvement manuals that are seldom taken out: Teach Yourself Bookkeeping and Accountancy, systems for a life that knows no chaos. But among the paper-back stack of mysteries (why should it be considered of interest to inmates to read of fictitious killings when we’ve performed the real thing?) — among these broken open at the spine as if what was to be found in them was to be cracked like a coconut or prised like an oyster, there are some real books, God knows how they got there. Maybe when you’re let out, done your time, as we say in here, it’s the form to donate your books for someone who’s surely going to come after. I sometimes find something for myself. There’s a translation of the Odyssey with fishmoths that have given up the ghost between pages. I’ve never known this book, its exalted category along with the bible, more than at second-hand from quotations in other books; if Harald’s read it he somehow didn’t succeed in interesting me. The architecture of ancient Greece — yes of course, that was more my line as a student, and I have the usual stock of bits and pieces of mythology. Oedipus put out his eyes for his crime. That’s about all. Rut now there’s something that’s for me, that’s been waiting for me, in this place, in my time. Time to read and re-read it. ‘With that he trained a stabbing arrow on Antinous … / just lifting a gorgeous golden loving-cup in his hands,/just tilting the two-handled goblet back to his lips,/about to drain the wine — and slaughter the last thing/on the suitor’s mind: who could dream that one foe/in that crowd of feasters, however great his power,/could bring down death on him, and black doom?/But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat/and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—/and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp/as the shaft sank home.’ And there is Odysseus shouting at the other men around Penelope ‘You dogs! … /so cocksure that you … wooed my wife/behind my back while I was still alive!’

The moment when you put your hand out to do it — the man in the madhouse was right, I don’t remember that moment but I reconstruct it, I’ve had to; I’ve found out that you think it’s a discovery , it’s something that’s come to you that has never been known before. But it’s always been there, it’s been discovered again and again, forever. Again and again, what Odysseus did, and what Homer, whoever he was, knew. Violence is a repetition we don’t seem able to break; oh look at them, my brothers— Bra , they have the right to claim me, we crowd of feasters on our own carrion in this place made secure for us alone — I look at them when we’re in the yard for our exercise, and they tramp and they lope round and round, round and round. I haven’t come to the end of the book, I don’t know how Odysseus reconstructed what he did, what way he found for himself. Put out your eyes. Turn the gun on your own head.

Or throw away the gun in the garden. That was a choice made. Can you break the repetition just by not perpetrating violence on yourself. I have this life, in here. I didn’t give it for his. I’ll even get out of here with it, some year or other. The murderer has not been murdered. My luck, this was abolished in my time. But I have to find a way. Carl’s death and Natalie’s child, I think of one, then the other, then the one, then the other. They become one, for me. It does not matter whether or not anyone else will understand: Carl, Natalie/Nastasya and me, the three of us. I’ve had to find a way to bring death and life together.

Nadine Gordimer is the author of thirteen novels, most recently Loot and Other Stories (2004), nine volumes of stories, and three nonfiction collections. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.