The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  —I can come with you, if you want.—

  No, Harald was touched by the awkward kindness that suddenly brought him together with this man but there should be no witness to the implications of Duncan’s absence from the cottage.

  Harald was in the room where Duncan slept. And the girl. There was a pot of face-cream among the cigarette packs on the left bedside table. He turned away respectfully from the appearance of the room, took shirts and underpants and socks from a wallcupboard while ignoring anything else, none of his business, stacked there.

  Don’t bring anything I was reading.

  The books weighing a rickety bamboo table to the right of the bed; but he went over, he picked them up, read the titles familiar or unfamiliar to him, with an awareness of being watched by the empty room itself. The table had a lower shelf from which architectural journals and newspapers were sprawled to the floor. To him they had the look of having been dropped there, that day, when the occupant of the bed lay listening to battering on his door. He knelt on one knee and straightened them into place but the shelf sagged and they spilled again, and mixed up with them was a notebook of the cheap kind schoolchildren use. He balanced it on top of the pile—what for? So that Duncan would be able to put his hand on it when he came back to sleep in that bed? As if the delusion existed that he was about to do so.

  He took up the notebook and opened it. He felt settle on the nape of his neck the meanness of what he was doing as he turned the pages, the betrayal of what the father had taught the son, you respect people’s privacy, you don’t read other people’s letters, you don’t read any personal matter that isn’t meant for your eyes. It was all ordinary, harmless—date when the car was last serviced, calculations of money amounts for some purpose or other, an address scored across, note of the back number of some architectural digest, not a diary but a jotter for preoccupations come to mind at odd hours. Then scrawled on the last page to have been used there was a passage copied from somewhere—Harald’s love of reading had been passed on when the boy was still a child. Harald recognized with the first few words, Dostoevsky, yes, Rogozhin speaking of Nastasya Filippovna. ‘She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not had me; that’s the truth. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water.’

  During the period of awaiting trial there are no proceedings in a criminal case with which the papers may feed sensations to the public. When the first reports of the Lindgard son accused of killing a man were published, there was a tacit hush formed around the arrival of the member of the Board of Directors at his office. Newspapers were turned face-down on the headlines or removed from where his eyes and those of others might meet above them. The chairman did not know whether, in the privacy of the Board Room, there should be a formal expression of sympathy and concern for the colleague held in high regard, and his wife, in their time of trouble—that was the phrasing he would have used—or whether it was more tactful and helpful to evade any official attention, the sort of thing that would be remembered although not recorded in the minutes, a kind of conviction-once-removed, going on record against Lindgard, the biological father, at least, of a crime. It was decided to make no statement from the Board. Individual members found appropriate moments when they condoled with him briefly, to limit embarrassment on both sides. The general attitude to be adopted was to show him that of course, the whole thing was preposterous, some ghastly mistake. He thanked them, without concurring; they took this to mean simply that he did not want to talk about the ghastly mistake. Most of them had sons and daughters of their own for whom such an act would be equally impossible.

  The period was dealt with on the only model within Lindgard’s and his colleagues’ experience: a remission in an illness about whose prognosis it is best not to enquire. In the men’s room one day a colleague with whom he had been a junior together and who had more concern for frankness of human feeling than about maintaining some convention of his dignity, spoke while peeing. As if it were a double relief:—When there’s ever anything I can do—I’ve no idea what that might be—don’t hesitate for a moment, or for any reason. It must be hell. I never know whether to talk about it or not, Harald; how you’d feel. Whatever kind of frame-up it is—it must be agonizing to deal with, knowing it just couldn’t be, it’s out of the question.—

  Lindgard had washed his hands. He was pulling the roller towel fastidiously to serve himself with a dry length. Now he spoke in this tiled enclave devoted to humble body functions.

  —It isn’t out of the question.—

  His colleague righted himself, stood in shock. It hadn’t been said. There are some things it’s not fair to have been told, the speaker will regret the telling the moment it has been done. He went quickly to the door and then turned and came back, put the flat of his hand on Lindgard’s shoulder-blade exactly where the son had made his gesture of communication when he met his father and mother for the first time in the visitors’ room.

  Few of the doctor’s patients connected her with one of the cases of violence they might have read about. There were so many; in a region of the country where the political ambition of a leader had led to killings that had become vendettas, fomented by him, a daily tally of deaths was routine as a weather report; elsewhere, taxi drivers shot one another in rivalry over who would choose to ride with them, quarrels in discotheques were settled by the final curse-word of guns. State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way.

  She did not work within a group, colleagues who would have to form an attitude to what set her apart among them. There was only Queen, the pert beauty preoccupied with her own authority as sister-in-charge at the clinic, and in the private surgery, Mrs February—whose ancestors had been dubbed with the name of the month in which they had been bought in the slave market—sat at her receptionist’s desk with the mournful eyes of a traditional dignified guise of trouble borne, in lieu of the doctor herself taking this on. It was a delicate expression of empathy that needed no passage of clumsy words. At the clinic and in her surgery hours, the doctor was within an unchanged enclosure of her life, a safe place; people who are surrounded by encroaching danger may be precariously protected for a time in areas declared as such by those outside threat, some agency of mercy. However she had difficulty in retaining the personal interest in patients’ lives which she had always held as essential to the practice of healing. The first identification with another whose son is imprisoned soon disappears in the crowd of those who are in misfortune; once truly jostled, become one among them, there has to be a sense that if I had to listen to your trouble you would have to listen to mine.

  She packed up with a food parcel the clothes Harald had brought home, re-folding them.

  Why didn’t you bring pyjamas?

  Young men don’t wear them, don’t you remember? There weren’t any. Don’t you remember, from when he still lived at home?

  How would I know what he slept in?

  Didn’t you see him walking around in shorts, underpants, in the summer often coming to breakfast like that?

  Of course, and didn’t she put away the clothes that came our of the wash, arrange their order in cupboards for the men in the family, the dutiful wife and mother expected, as well, of the doctor.

  I didn’t occupy my time entirely with underpants.

  Seems to me there must be a lot of things. Much that we didn’t remember. Don’t remember.

  I wish you’d say what you mean. It’s difficult enough … to talk, to know what we’re saying. I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to catch me out, get me to explain, because I’m his mother, I ought to know, I should know why.

  And I’m his father! I ought to know!

  They stayed up late as they could in order to shorten the intervening night before the visit to the prison. At random he put a cassette of a Woody Allen film into the video player. When the lugubrious face appeared, Claudia re
marked that the cassette was Duncan’s, lent to them and not returned. Perhaps it was an attempt, pathetic or ironic, to assert that she remembered something, a loose end, between them and their son. They heard each other laugh at parts of the film; and then it was over, the light on the screen drew in upon itself, vanished into the succubus of darkness. In bed, they lay in that darkness. Harald put his arm over her back, round her waist, but did not take her breast in his hand; it, too, lay there, open. Harald and Claudia had not made love since the night the messenger came. It was not possible for them. It might have been good, it might have helped—after all, they had been able to laugh—but there was witness, from a prison cell, closing her body, making him impotent.

  He thought under cover of darkness he might tell her what he had read on the last page of the notebook. Under cover of darkness: the place to understand, for them to understand what Dostoevsky revealed of their son, and to their son, of himself. Claudia read medical journals, she probably had never read Dostoevsky, he did not reproach her for it, in his mind; she healed while he could ensure—‘insure’—as a compensation for pain and disaster, only money, but how to expect her to be able to interpret a passage from the depths of a mind with whose workings she was totally unfamiliar.

  In the darkness he could disguise the reference that was within him, as a mood of practicality, necessity; the sole action open to them was to find the next thing to do.

  We’ve the right to expect her to come to us. We have to see the girl.

  Harald kept the key Khulu had given him and returned to the cottage and took, in the silence of the deserted bedroom, the notebook. Read again the passage of text that his son had found—what?—so devastating, a judgment unable to escape; or was it such a confirmation of ego, of power, that he could make of it his text, flaunt it, live by it. Act on it.

  Harald went again through the pages. There were a few lines he had missed the first time, among banal jottings; another quotation but nothing he could put a name to. It was scribbled in overlapping large script, the kind of result of something remembered and written by feel, in the dark, half-awake. ‘I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.’ There was a dash, the initial ‘N’. A piece of adolescent self-dramatization probably divided into the broken lines of blank verse in the original, and hardly in a class to be appreciated along with Dostoevsky. He took the notebook to his office and locked it in a drawer of his desk; it was confidential, between him and his son as the two lovers of literature in the family, in their knowledge that the terrible genius of literature can give licence. His son did not know of this confidentiality. He did not know that his father had sneaked into his adult privacy and stolen his cryptic quotes with the intention of deciphering him.

  Hamilton Motsamai was already in contact with the girl—of course. He stretched behind his desk and turned a gleaming yawn into a smile, in tolerance of the ignorance of lay people of how lawyers have to think ahead of them.—We don’t know this lady. You met her a few times? She has not put herself in a very good light, in view of her behaviour that night. There will be a certain reluctance I anticipate … ah-hêh … (he paddled the air with spread hands) to bring her little performance on the sofa out in court, that we’re aware of. So I’m not disturbed at all that the Deputy Attorney General has put her on the list for prosecution witness. That means I can cross examine her. You follow?—I couldn’t do that if I were to call her as a defence witness. But I’ve also made a request to the prosecutor which hasn’t been refused. He’s allowing me access—I can have her. Permission to bring her here to talk. Seems for the moment he’s undecided whether he’s going to use her or not, but I’m sure he will, in the end. He will. So he’ll recall permission after I’ve seen her, but that’s okay, that’s fine. To cover her own hanky-panky she may try some damaging character allegations about Duncan that would be useful to the prosecution. But I expect to have all I’ll need from her for when I get her on the witness stand. A lot depends on her attitude to your son. Is she still attached to him? Or is there some bad feeling, resentment towards him, so she’ll try to make herself look blameless—never mind the sofa—in any provocation that led him to this act. What about her character. All we have is her name, Natalie James, she has worked at an institute for market research, she’s been a hostess on a cruise ship to the Greek islands, she was at one time secretary to a university professor somewhere, and now she describes herself as ‘free lance’, I don’t know in what. What field. She also writes poems. I have informed her you want to see her. She says she will only meet you here, with me. Not at your place.—

  Claudia keeps herself turned away while Motsamai speaks, it’s as if she would shut her eyes to concentrate best on what he is saying.

  —Have you talked to Duncan about her?—

  —He tells me they were lovers, but they ‘lived their own lives’—these are his words.—

  A day and time were set up to meet the girl at Senior Counsel’s chambers. That morning Claudia telephoned Harald from her surgery to his office. A representative of the government Housing Commission was with him, they were discussing an agreement on terms of low-interest loans that would put up walls and a roof for thousands of poor people; there was a long negotiation about to come to a conclusion, or to risk being deferred yet again.

  Harald, I’m not going. There’s no need for us to meet her if the lawyer is handling her. I don’t want to see her. We should leave it to him.

  As if he had been shaken and dragged out of bed in the middle of a night; for a moment he did not recognize what he was being recalled to, his comprehension was torn in two. The man from the Commission picked up his papers in order to be seen to be not listening. Harald was possessed by wild irritation, with her, Claudia, her intrusion, her recall to the intrusion in their life that monstrously displaced everything else, his fifty years, eclipsed the sun and shut off the air of all he had learnt, the understandings he believed he had reached in knowledge of human beings and the mores he had tested, the satisfaction in work and the pleasures of accepted emotions, the love between man and woman, between parents and son, the ease of friendship; irritation that swelled and struck out—even at his son, Duncan, who had landed himself in prison. Yes! Clamouring forces were struggling to take over his innards, forces that if let loose outside were the kind that could be violent. He could not speak, not even pronounce oblique dismissive, soothing things to her that nevertheless would relate to a situation the other man in the room was completely remote, removed from, innocent of. He put down the receiver on her mid-sentence.

  Natalie-Nastasya. Motsamai said she was already there, had gone to the ladies’ room.

  Received by a father’s eyes as she came in she matched the young woman Duncan had brought to the townhouse once or twice. This was she, all right. She was closing the door with a hand curving gracefully behind her, Motsamai smiling acknowledgment of the consideration. So Motsamai, also, felt an attraction she apparently emanated for some—many—men.

  The same sloping shoulders of a Modigliani model (and there was a print of a Modigliani nude, unremarked until it came to him now, in the bedroom he had plundered). He was not one to take much notice of women’s clothes, only of the effect they produced, but it seemed she wore the same kind of garments she had worn, legs outlined in something like a dancer’s tights and a loose shirt unbuttoned on a deep V of sun-stippled throat. The hair was somehow different—whatever colour it had been before it was now boot-polish black—but the eyes, the gaze on him, were unavoidably recognizable. Perhaps there was a place in memory, a cheap photo album of Duncan’s girls that existed though never opened. That was the impression of her: yellow-streaked dark eyes (colours of the Tiger’s Eye paperweight on Motsamai’s desk) secretive within extremely thick lashes on both upper and lower lids that tangled at the outer corners. And these outer corners of the eyes turned down slightly, whether by the nature of her facial muscles or by an expression she
permanently arranged; the eyes were a statement to be read, depending on who was receiving it: lazily, vulnerably appealing, or calculating, in warning.

  When Duncan brought girls—his women—to the townhouse it could not be thought of (really) as bringing them ‘home’, home was left behind where he grew up, was the house they had sold, abandoned as having become a burden no longer necessary. Dropping in for a meal accompanied by a girl did not mean that he was presenting her to his parents as someone to whom he had a serious commitment, but it also did not mean that she was a passing fancy; if those existed, they did not warrant the degree of intimacy implied by being admitted, however casually, to the area of his life he shared, committed to it by the past, with Harald and Claudia. He must have brought her at least because she was on a level of personality that interested him; come to think of it, that was how he, Harald, thought of the criterion on which a son introduced a lover to his parents. How Claudia thought of it—she had referred to the girl as ‘that little bitch who shacked up with Duncan’. How could she have formed that impression in the few times Duncan had brought the girl to the townhouse—oh and the single occasion on which Duncan had bought theatre tickets and the four had seen a play together, an occasion when one listened and looked and didn’t have much of an exchange. Women see things among themselves, about one another, that you have to belong to their sex to attribute, whether these attributions are just or not. Whatever this girl was, there was a judgment on her, by Claudia, as the cause of whatever terrible consequences Duncan’s embroilment in her life had brought about. But how to believe, Claudia, at the same time, both that Duncan could not have performed that act, the final act of all human acts, the irreparable one, the irreversible one, and that this girl, little bitch, was important enough to him for her behaviour to cause him to be suspected of performing that act? The torturing preoccupation when such contemplation seized him was out of place here and now: he had lost attention to what was passing as the three of them, he, the girl, Motsamai, were sitting together in Senior Counsel’s chambers. What had Motsamai just said? Mr Lindgard and his wife are naturally concerned to have your version of what happened that Thursday night.