The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Apparently he did not know what he wanted to be.

  Claudia understood her accomplice’s observation to be about their son’s sexuality. Even in this strange new form of intimacy that had come to replace the other (revitalized it in a way that shouldn’t be examined), he could not tell her what really was coming back to him: ‘ … the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying.’

  The statements that seem to have been emptied of all meaning by endless repetition are the truest. Conventional wisdom is the most demonstrable. Life goes on. It did not stop dead that Friday night; that solution is not on offer. Ever. Neither from Harald’s resource of God in His wisdom—he had to accept that refusal if not as His will, then as man’s lot; nor from Claudia’s rational experience that while some conditions appear terminal, some semblance of life persists. Hamilton said he was satisfied with the preparation of Heads of Argument and that he could come by and bring his clients up-to-date on his way home, why not, no inconvenience to him. So they put out the tray with glasses, the ice, soda, and bottles. Hamilton likes his tot of brandy. A few days before, Claudia, waiting at a traffic light, had unthinkingly beckoned to a prancing man holding up a candelabra of red lilies and bought flowers again, as she had used to on the way home from her surgery. They were under shaded lamplight. Hamilton entered the mise en scene of life going on as he did the equally well-appointed room in his chambers; as if every place were made ready for his presence. Something to drink was welcome; he tested the brandy, clucked his tongue, and got up from the chair he had chosen to serve himself a spurt of soda.

  —My news is the date is set. A month from today.—

  —It couldn’t be sooner?—

  —I know it seems long, but Duncan understands. And the judge is the one I had in mind. So.—

  —What does Duncan understand, Hamilton?—Harald was not to be fobbed off with some assurance about delay.—We haven’t much way of finding out from him. But you know that, we’ve gone through it with you over and over. Does he understand you’re relying on getting the girl to show she was the one who drove him to some edge of madness from which he could do what he did? She’ll do this, out of her own mouth. I mean, does he believe it: that she was what it was. That he was possessed—in some way. I don’t see how your use of her can help Duncan if he won’t accept this manoeuvring of the—this—I don’t know what to call it—justification.—

  —No no, not of the act; of the state of mind, the state of mind, Harald. This was not something premeditated. It was breaking-point—and she put him there, she did it! There on the sofa with Jespersen! It was her work!—

  Motsamai was legs apart wide at the thighs, leaning out towards them in his body’s emphasis, as he did from behind the desk in chambers, the gleam of day’s efforts shone on the obsidian of his face, his blackness was the stamp of authority in the room.—He says he’s guilty. That’s all. I’m going to show why. I’m going to show who else is. How.—

  —So he hates her now. Whether or not he’s ready to blame her for himself and what he did. Hates her for what he found.—Claudia looked to Harald.

  Motsamai answered them both, but taking his attention inward for a moment.—He doesn’t speak about her. He doesn’t want to think of her, that’s my impression. I don’t succeed, in that direction, with him. So I take it he leaves it to me. He knows I’m going to cross examine her.—

  —Hates her now. Or he loves her.—

  Claudia’s laconic either/or is irrelevant to Motsamai.

  —Of course he knows, too, that I’m calling Khulu Dladla. Ah-hêh. —

  —For the adventure with Jespersen.—

  —Oh indeed. Indeed I shall, Harald. Jespersen has—he had—his part in the state of mind, didn’t he—ve-rr-y much so. He and the girl. Fatal combination. Isn’t there good reason to believe that not content with throwing over his male lover, he got some kind of extra kick out of sleeping with the woman the ex-lover had taken up? Perhaps there was contempt or some sort of revenge, the lover has deserted the set in the house, so to speak, defecting to the female sex. Preferring women! Who really can follow these bisexual variations. They both were Duncan’s lovers. Maybe each had some grievance against him, you know how such things are, even in ordinary love matters—my God, if you could hear some of the motives I come across in my briefs. Man! There could have been spite against Duncan the shameless pair were prepared to enjoy themselves with. Certainly they couldn’t have thought of a better way to hurt and humiliate and push such a man to the point of self-destruction. A confession of guilt can be a kind of suicide. That’s what I see here, and my task is to save my client from it. That’s why I’m going to cross examine Miss Natalie James and I’m calling Mr Nkululeko Dladla.—

  Suicide. But he didn’t turn the gun on himself in the cottage, he threw it away.

  Claudia and Harald are returned to that scene.

  Suicide. The State may do it for you if you are convicted of murder. Harald speaks for them.

  —We’ve never discussed the sentence. If the mitigation plea succeeds. Or if it does not.—

  Hamilton Motsamai’s face, the depth of bass in a long register of that intoning of his, the groaning, tender ah-hehheh … mmhê reached out to them in embrace.—I know what you’re thinking. But the penalty hasn’t been exacted for some time, there’s been a moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the old Constitution became inevitable. It’s all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. The first case to be heard there, as a matter of fact, is the charge that it is illegal under the interim Constitution. The Death Penalty. I’m confident the Court will rule that it’s unconstitutional. It will be abolished. Finished and done before we get sentence passed down. Ah-hêh. Only for the time being it’s still on the Statute Book.—

  As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people—privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate in retribution—dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social policies where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of that State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster—the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr Lindgard once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely, any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

  The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still had seemed to have nothing to do with them, with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror—they had been unable to think further, only abstractedly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors’ room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who, in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation to God’s forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.’ The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

  Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nake
dness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts’ foyer, of being one among the fathers of thieves and murderers was now confirmed. The instinct to go and worship in the cathedral among people from the streets, which had seemed a way of avoiding the sympathy of his suburban peers, had been the taking of his rightful place with those most bowed to misfortune. The truth of all this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety—that other form of segregation—could change their status. In its way, that status was definitive as the forced removals of the old regime; no chance of remaining where they had been, surviving in themselves as they were. Even money; that could buy for them only the best lawyer available. It could buy Motsamai. Motsamai’s extenuating circumstances stood between them—Duncan, Harald, Claudia—and the decision of another court, a court whose decision would not be made on any circumstances in mitigation of the act of an individual, but on the collective morality of a nation which is the substance of a constitution—the right of an individual to life, even if that individual has taken another’s life, and whether the State has the right itself to become a murderer, taking its victim’s life by the neck, hanged in the early morning in Pretoria.

  Death Penalty.

  Motsamai is confident it will be abolished. ‘Finished and done’ (polylingual as he is, what was on his tongue and translated for their language preference was probably the more expressive Afrikaans-English slang, finished and klaar). But while the man killed on that sofa is under the ground, under the foundation of the townhouse and the prison, and Duncan is in a cell, it is on the Statute Book, it is the law’s right, the State’s right: to kill.

  Just as it was the abstract larger question of a civilized nation’s morality that was all that engaged Harald and Claudia when there was no question it could ever have any application to them and theirs, so this night the larger question had no place in the blinding immediacy: Duncan in a cell, awaiting the sentence to be passed down. They were two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence. The embrace of his confidence—wasn’t it the expression of the man, rather than the lawyer, compassion that was on the Other Side, inner side, of his patronizing command, that shell of ego he had had to burnish to get where he was, granted as the best available for this case, among a choice of white Senior Counsel.

  Neither could stop thinking about the repulsion they had felt, no escaping it, at the sight of, the situation of Duncan between two warders, this last time in the visitors’ room, that place stripped bare of anything but confrontation. Prison, it was all confrontation, all—perpetrator and jailer, perpetrator turned victim of jailer, son become betrayer of the love parents had given him, parents become betrayers of the covenant made with him. The distaste they had felt suddenly that time, no, these last few times, before him in the visitors’ room. It was revulsion that had brought them together. Revulsion against their child, their son, their man—no matter what he has done—who was brought into being by an old, first passion of mating. The sorrow that it was the shameful degeneracy, sickness of this conspiracy of rejection that had revitalized the marriage brought a collapse into grief. He lay with his arms around her, her back and the length of her legs against him, their feet touching like hands, what she used to like to call the stowed fork-and-spoon position, and they were dumb. Impossible to say it: sentenced to death. It was a long time, lying like that. At last she felt that he had fallen asleep, his hand on her body twitched in submerged distress, like the legs of the dog when it dreamt it was fleeing. Harald doesn’t pray any more. Suddenly this came to her; and was terrible. She wept, careful not to wake him, her mouth open in a gasp, tears running into it.

  Plan.

  Duncan has a table, a T-square, an adjustable set-square, a scale rule, a circle template in the prison cell and while he is awaiting trial and sentence a month from now he draws a plan. Does he understand he may be going to die? Is this defiance—a plan, a future—because he understands that? Or is it that he has some crazed idea, inexpressible hope in despair, that he will walk out of that place back into his life. He will be free of what he has told, although he has told them, he killed a man. Time will reel backwards with the skitter of one of those tapes he and the girl must have played in bed at night—they were on the bamboo table with the journals and the notebook—and partying that Thursday will end no differently than it must have done many times.

  A dead man, as Harald has said, is not present to receive grace; a dead man has no plan.

  Everything is changed. So it is not incongruous to Harald that this old building commanding one of the ridges that drop away North from the highveld city, red-faced as the imperialist fathers who had it constructed with wide-flanked entrance and wood-valanced verandahs, has changed character. It is the old Fever Hospital facade he’s looking along as he approaches but it is no longer a place of isolation for those who might spread disease down there among the population; it is the seat of the Constitutional Court. It will house the antithesis of the confusion and disorientation of the fevered mind: it is to be the venue of the furthest extension of measured justice that exists anywhere, a court where any citizen may bring any law that affects him or her to be tested against individual rights as entrenched in the new Constitution. The Constitutional Court, the Last judgment, will be the final arbiter of human conduct down in the city, in the entire country. Its justice will be based on the morality of the State itself, land and shelter, freedom of expression, of movement, of labour—no doubt these will be the issues of some applications to the Court, but they are only components of the ultimate to which this kind of court is avowed as no other tribunal can be: the right to life. The right to life: it’s engraved on the founding document of the State, it is the declared national ethos; there, in the Constitution.

  Health not sickness, life not death is the venue.

  The first application the Court will hear, convened for the first time, is that of two men in the cells in Pretoria awaiting execution. They exist under the moratorium. They do not know when or if the moratorium will end; the Death Penalty is still on the Statute Book. Neither has committed a capital crime for any cause larger than himself, a means to a political objective; each is what is known as a common criminal and he has been convicted of murder by due process in a court of law. He is not contesting his guilt. He is contesting the right of the State to murder him, in turn. The submission will be that the Death Penalty is in contravention of the Constitution. The right to life.

  Harald has read this much in the newspapers. He comes, as if to a clandestine rendez-vous, to the old Fever Hospital. It is an assignation for him; he goes quickly up the steps, in the foyer does not know which carpeted area to follow, the place must have been totally refurbished, it has governmental status of elegance, not a whiff of disinfectant left, a bank of lifts before the inlaid floor’s jigsaw of coloured stone, the potted palms. The atmosphere is less like the approach to Court B17 than the preparation for business seminars he attends in the conference centres of chain hotels. Men and women, minor functionaries, cross and recross with the unseeing eyes cultivated by waiters who do not want to be summoned. But a member of boards has a presence that is like a garment that can’t be discarded although he himself feels that it hangs on him hollowly; a young woman recognizes it and consents to turn her attention to indicate the correct level and hall.

  There is fuss and self-important to-and-fro in the destination he had found and where he is obviously early. He’s shunted from one unfamiliar place to another these days: this is a well-appointed submarine, low ceiling lit over an elliptical dais where empty official chairs are ranged high-backed either side of an imposing presiding one. Behind the dais, stage curta
ins apparently disguise a private entrance. Facing all this is a well of polished panelling and tables with recording devices for scribes, and cordoned-off by a token wooden barrier (standard furnishings, he has learnt, of premises of the law) are rows of seats for the public who have come to hear final justice being done; or for other reasons, like himself.

  The seats are empty but he is asked to move from the one he has chosen neither too near nor too far from the front because someone is dealing out ‘Reserved’ cards along that row. The pillars that hold up the ceiling are to be avoided; he hesitates before making a second choice, and now it’s as if he is in some sort of theatre and must be able to follow the performance unhindered. A functionary brings water carafes to the curve of table before the official chairs; a tested microphone gargles and shrieks; the functionaries give one another chummy orders in a mixture of English and Afrikaans … the mind wanders … so at this level of the civil service (and of warders who stand at either side of the prisoner in the visitors’ room) it is still the preserve of these white men and women, the once chosen people, old men wheezing out their days as janitors, the younger men and women belonging to the last generation whose employment by the State when they left school was a sinecure of whiteness. Back and forth they hasten, in front and behind Harald; the young women all seem to be wearing a uniform by tacit consent, some type of outfit varied according to fancy and enhancement of sexual attraction. Black-and-white, like the court-room figures in the reproductions of Daumier lithographs he and Claudia picked up along the bookstalls in Paris one year, they should give them to Hamilton, the right addition to the ikons of legal prestige in that room with its own shiny expanse—the desk—and the resuscitating cabinet from which brandy is dinspensed with kindness at the right moment to a man drowning in what he has had revealed to him. Harald recalls himself; looking at his watch. And people are beginning to arrive and take up seats around him.