The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  The purpose of a doctor’s life is to defend the body against the violence of pain. She stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause it. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life.

  This body whose interior she is exploring with a plastic-gloved hand like a diviner’s instinctively led to a hidden water-source, has a foetus, three months of life inside it.

  I’m telling you true. I was never so sick with the others. Every morning, sick as a dog.

  Vomit your heart out.

  D’you think that means it’s a boy, doctor? The patient has the mock coyness women often affect towards a doctor, the consulting room is their stage with a rare chance for a little performance. Ag, my husband’d be over the moon. But I tell him, if we don’t come through with it right this time, I don’t know about you, I’m giving up.

  The doctor obliges by laughing with her.

  We could do a simple test if you want to know the sex.

  Oh no, it’s God’s will.

  Next come a succession of the usual heart ailments and bronchial infections. Life staggers along powered by worn bellows of old people’s lungs and softly pulses visibly between the ribs of a skinny small boy. Some who turn up this week as every week have eyes narrowed by the gross fatty tissue of their faces and others continue to present the skin infections characteristic of malnutrition. They eat too much or they have too little to eat. It’s comparatively easy to prescribe for the first because they have the remedy in themselves. For the second, what is prescribed is denied them by circumstances outside their control. Green vegetables and fresh fruit—they are too poor for the luxury of these remedies, what they have come to the clinic for is a bottle of medicine. The doctor knows this but she has ready a supply of diet sheets which propose meals made with various pulses as some sort of substitute for what they should be able to eat. She hands a sheet encouragingly to the woman who has brought her two grandchildren to the doctor. Their scarred grey-filmed legs are bare but despite the heat they watch the doctor from under thick woollen caps that cover the sores on their heads and come down right to the eyebrows. The woman doesn’t need the nurse to interpret, she can read the sheet and studies it slowly at arm’s length in the manner of ageing people becoming far-sighted. She folds it carefully. Her time is up. She shepherds the children to the door. She thanks the doctor. I don’t know what I can get. Maybe I can try buy some these things. The father, he’s still in jail. My son.

  Charge sheet. Indictment. Harald kept himself at a remove of cold attention in order to separate what was evidence against interpretation of that evidence. Circumstantial: that day, that night, Friday, 19th January, 1996, a man was found dead in a house he shared with two other men. David Baker and Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla came home at 7.15 p.m. and found the body of their friend Carl Jespersen in the living-room. He had a bullet wound in the head. He was lying half-on, half-off the sofa, as if (interpretation) he had been taken by surprise when shot and had tried to rise. He was wearing thonged sandals, one of which was twisted, hanging off his foot, and beneath a towelling dressing-gown he was naked. There were glasses on an African drum beside the sofa. One held the dregs of what appeared to have been a mixture known as a Bloody Mary—an empty tin of tomato juice and a bottle of vodka were on top of the television set. The other glasses were apparently unused; there was an unopened bottle of whisky and a bucket of half-melted ice on a tray on the floor beside the drum. (Evidence combined with interpretation.) There was no unusual disorder in the room; this is a casual bachelor household. (Interpretation.) The room was in darkness except for the pin-point light of the CD player that had come to the end of a disc and not been switched off. The front door was locked but glass doors which led from the living-room to the garden were open, as they generally would be in summer, even after dark.

  The garden is one in which a cottage is sited. The cottage is occupied by Duncan Lindgard, a mutual friend of the dead man and the two men who discovered him, and they ran to him after they had discovered Jespersen’s body. Lindgard’s dog was asleep outside the cottage and apparently there was no-one at home. The police came about twenty minutes later. A man, a plumber’s assistant, Petrus Ntuli, who occupied an outhouse on the property in exchange for work in the garden, was questioned and said that he had seen Lindgard come out on the verandah of the house and drop something as he crossed the garden to the cottage. Ntuli thought he would retrieve whatever it was, for Lindgard, but could not find anything. He called out to Lindgard but Lindgard had already entered the cottage. Ntuli did not have a watch. He could not say what time this was, but the sun was down. The police searched the garden and found a gun in a clump of fern. Baker and Dladla immediately identified it as the gun kept in the house as mutual protection against burglars; neither could recall in which of their three names it was licensed. The police proceeded to the cottage. There was no response to knocking on the door, but Ntuli insisted that Lindgard was inside. The police then effected entry by forcing the kitchen door and found that Lindgard was in the bedroom. He seemed dazed. He said he had been asleep. Asked whether he knew his friend Carl Jespersen had been attacked, he went white in the face (interpretation) and demanded, Is he dead?

  He then protested about the police invasion of his cottage and insisted that he be allowed to make several telephone calls, one of which was to his lawyer. The lawyer evidently advised him not to resist arrest and met him at the police station where fingerprint tests were inconclusive because the clump of fern had been watered recently and the fingerprints on the gun were largely obliterated by mud.

  This is not a detective story.

  Harald has to believe that the mode of events that genre represents is actuality.

  This is the sequence of actions by which a charge of murder is arrived. When he recounts to Claudia what he heard from the lawyer she moves her head from side to side at each stage of detail and does not interrupt. He has the impression she is hearing him out; yet when he has finished, she says nothing. He sees, from her silence, he has said nothing; brought back nothing that would explain. Duncan came out of that man’s house and dropped something in the garden on his way back to his cottage. A gun was found. Duncan said he was asleep and did not hear either his friends or the police when they knocked at the door. None of this tells anything more, gives any more explanation than there was in the confrontation across the barrier in court. His brief embrace with head turned away. His reply to any need: nothing. Harald sees, informed by Claudia’s presence, that what he has related, to himself and her, is indeed a crude whodunnit.

  Bail application by the good friend cocksure lawyer had been again refused.

  But why? Why? All she can call to mind is some unquestioned accepted reasoning that one who is likely to commit another crime cannot be let loose on the mere security of money. Duncan, a danger to society! For god’s sake, why?

  The prosecutor’s got wind of some idea that he might disappear—leave.

  The country?

  Now they are in the category of those who buy themselves out of retribution because they can afford to put up bail and then estreat. He did not know whether she understood this implication of refusal, for their son and themselves.

  Where does the idea come from?

  The girl’s been called for questioning, apparently she said he’s been threatening to take up a position he’s been offered with a practice in Singapore. I don’t know—to get away from her, it sounds like. Something she let slip, maybe intentionally. Who can fathom what was going on between them.

  If Claudia is dissatisfied with what little Harald has learned in explanation, could she have been more successful? Well, let her try, then.

  An awaiting-trial prisoner has the right to visits. Her turn: I’d like to talk to that Julian whatever-his-name, before we go.

  Harald knows that both have an irrational revulsion against contact with the young man: don’t kill the messenger, the threat is the message.

  Claudia is not the only woma
n with a son in prison. Since this afternoon she has understood that. She is no longer the one who doles out comfort or its placebos for others’ disasters, herself safe, untouchable, in another class. And it’s not the just laws that have brought about this form of equality; something quite other. There’s no sentimentality in this, either, which is why she will not speak of it to anyone, not even to the one who is the father of a son in prison; it might be misinterpreted.

  She telephoned the lawyer to obtain the number of the messenger who had presented himself at the townhouse security gate and entered at the hour of after-dinner coffee. She was adamant, Harald could hear as she reached the messenger, that he should come back that evening. Not tomorrow. Now.

  This time when he opened the door to the messenger, Harald offered his hand to him: Julian Verster. Claudia had noted down the name.

  How did they seem to him? The occasion had no precedent to go by; a social occasion, an inquisition, an appeal—what kind of hospitality is this, what signifying arrangements are appropriate, as the provision of tea or drinks set out, the placing of ashtrays and arrangement of a comfortable chair signify the nature of other occasions. Everything in its customary place in the room; that in itself inappropriate, even bizarre.

  Their attitude towards him had changed, overcome by need. They saw in this young man the possibility of some answers, they might read even in his appearance something of the context in which what had happened could happen. Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself. Bulky running shoes with intricate embellishments, high tongues and thick soles, that cabinet ministers as well as clerks and students wear now, and Harald himself, at leisure, wears; pitted skin on the cheeks, the tribal marks of adolescent acne, wide-spaced dog’s-brown eyes darkened by heavy eyebrows authoritatively contradicting the uncertainties of a mouth that moves, shaping and reshaping itself before he speaks. A face that suggests a personality subservient and loyal: an ideal component of a coterie. In business, Harald is accustomed to being observant of such things when meeting prospective associates.

  —I’m sorry to have interrupted your plans for the evening, like this, but when you came that night we were all … I don’t know … we couldn’t say much. It was difficult to take in anything. As Duncan’s friend, you must have felt something the same—it must have been hard for you to have to come to us. We know that.—

  The young man acknowledges with an understanding downturn of the lips that this is, in turn, her way of extending a hand to him.

  —I felt awful—that I did it so badly—I couldn’t think of any other way. Awful. And he’d asked me, he left it to me.—

  They sat in a close group now. Claudia was turned to him, sharing the sofa, and Harald drew up a chair, to speak.

  —Why didn’t he call us himself.—

  But it was a judgment rather than a question.

  —Oh Harald … that’s obvious.—

  —He was terribly shocked, you can’t imagine.—

  —That was at the police station?—

  —No, the house, he reached me on my cell phone and I just turned round in the middle of the road, where I was … he was still with the police at the house, the cottage.—

  Claudia’s knees and hands matched, tight together, hands on knees.—You went to the house.—

  —Yes. I saw. I couldn’t believe it.—

  To them, what was seen is the man in the mortuary (Claudia knows the post-mortem procedure; the body may be kept for days before the process is performed). But—there in his face—to this Julian Verster what was seen was his friend, as Duncan is his friend. This realization makes it possible to begin to say what it is they want of him. Out of some instinctive agreement, neither has any right above the other, they question him alternately; they’ve found a formula, at least some structure they have put together for themselves in the absence of any precedent.

  —Could you give us an idea of how, at all, Duncan could have been mixed up in this, how his—what shall I say?—his position as some sort of tenant, his relationship to the men in the house —these friends—could have led to the circumstantial evidence there seems to be against him? I was at the lawyer’s today. You belong to that group of friends, don’t you? We don’t know any of them, really—

  Claudia turned to Harald, but with eyes distantly lowered for the interjection.—Except the girl, his girl-friend, he’s brought her with him once or twice, here. But apparently she wasn’t there on Friday. She’s not been mentioned.—

  —Could you tell us something about the friendship, they all more or less share the property, they must have got on well with one another, to decide to do that, live in such close proximity—what could lead to Duncan being accused of such a horror? You must understand we’ve lived, my wife and I, parents and son, as three independent adults, we’re close but we don’t expect to be privy to everything in his life. Different relationships. We have ours with him, he has his with others. It’s been fine. But when something like this falls on your head—we understand what this —respect, I suppose, for one another, can mean. Just that we don’t know anything we need to know. Who was this man? What did Duncan have to do with him? You must know! We can’t go to see Duncan tomorrow and ask him, can we? In a prison visitors’ room? Warders there, who else—

  —We’ve all been friends quite a long time, well certainly Dave, he studied architecture along with Duncan, and so did I—I’m with Duncan in the same firm. But I didn’t join them when they took the house and the cottage together. Khulu’s a journalist, I think Duncan got to know him first, when Khulu wanted to move into town from Tembisa. Carl, Carl Jespersen—(it is difficult to speak of, or hear spoken of, in the tone of ordinary information, a man lying in a mortuary) Jespersen came I think about two years ago with a Danish—or maybe it was Norwegian—film crew and somehow he didn’t go back. He works—was working with an advertising agency. The three of them took the main house and Duncan took the cottage. But they more or less run the whole place together. I mean, I’m often there, it’s pretty much open house, some good times.—

  There are his inhibitions to be overcome; his loyalty, the prized confidentiality bestowed upon the messenger by the privilege of friendship with one he admires or who is, perhaps, professionally cleverer than he. What is emerging is an aside: the nature of his relationship with their son. It is difficult not to become impatient.

  —So everyone got on well together, all right. There were no real tensions you know of? How serious they would have to be if we are to believe that Duncan, Duncan … ! Never mind the gun, never mind what the man in the garden says he saw! Isn’t there someone else who really did have what he thought was a reason to attack Jespersen? Why Duncan? Anyone you know of?—

  Harald’s line of thought scored across hers.

  —Where was the girl. Where was she on Friday? Has the affair broken up, were she and Duncan no longer lovers?—

  The young man has to adjust himself to communication with a father who does not require the euphemism ‘girl-friend’ as suitable in communication with parents.

  —They’re still together. Of course you know—she was there. The day before, Thursday night. We all ate at the house. Carl and David cooked for everyone.—

  Was there nothing more to say? To be got from him; he is the messenger, he must not know more than the text he has been entrusted with.

  Claudia drops her hands at her sides; the fingers stir.—Please tell us.—

  Harald stands up.

  The young man looked from one to the other as if for mercy, and then began in the only way he could manage, the dull defused tone of one relating the circumstances of a traffic accident in which no-one was hurt: the matter-of-factness that defends cornered emotion.

  —Last year, in June, Carl got her a job at the advertising agency and they began to go to work in her car every day. Or sometimes in his. I don’t know the arrangement. So they’d often have lunch somewhere together, too. But it was all right.—
r />   —What do you mean?—Harald is looking down at him.

  —Duncan didn’t mind. Didn’t have anything to worry about.—

  —Didn’t mind that his lover was spending all day with another man?—

  —Well, Carl and David were lovers. The three of them in the house are gay, Khulu too. Gay men are often very good friends to women, and they’re no threat to women’s lovers, you know that, of course. Carl and Duncan and Natalie are great friends. Special friends, in the group around the house. They were.—

  —I see.—

  But Harald, conscious that this is the reaction of himself as a heterosexual man, does not see how Duncan could not resent his woman spending her days with another male, no matter what sex was attractive to that male. His monosyllabic response opens the way, to him and to Claudia, for the return of dread, the dread that came with the pronouncement of the first message, that night; that Friday.

  —Please tell us.—

  It’s a knell that Claudia sounds.

  —On Thursday we all stayed quite late up at the house. There were some other people there, a couple of Khulu’s friends as well. When we left, and Khulu’d gone off with his crowd, I walked with Duncan back to the cottage. Natalie had volunteered to help Carl with the washing-up, David had had a few drinks too many and went to bed. But apparently when everything was tidied up in the kitchen, Natalie didn’t go to the cottage. Duncan woke up around two o’clock and saw she wasn’t there with him. He was worried something might have happened to her, crossing the garden in the dark, and he went over to the house. Yes. Carl was making love to her in the living-room. Duncan didn’t arrive at work on Friday morning and he called me at the office. He told me. He said he found them on the sofa—that sofa, you know. What can I say. It wasn’t the first time Natalie had had some sort of thing going on the side with someone else—I know, we all knew, of one, at least. It’s in her nature, but I think she loves him—Duncan. In her way. And he—he’s absolutely faithful to her, completely possessive, other women don’t exist for Duncan. Recriminations and tears—the usual thing—and then she comes back to him. But this time —Carl. A man who doesn’t love women, but goes for Natalie. To put it crudely. Makes Natalie the exception, leaves his lover asleep in the bedroom and makes love to Natalie on that sofa. Duncan was—I can’t describe it, a terrible state. She wouldn’t come back to the cottage, I suppose she was afraid of him. She left. Got in her car and left in the middle of the night, and she didn’t come back on Friday, either. She wasn’t there. When whatever happened, happened. So that is all I know, and I’m not saying Duncan must have done what he’s supposed to have done, I’m not implying anything, I won’t have you thinking that what I’ve told you is conclusive, I wasn’t there, I didn’t see, although I know Duncan well, your son, I don’t know what went on inside him—