The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Like the deadpan of a tough negotiator you’re used to in the Board Room, Dad.—

  He forces them to smile.

  —Khulu sends his greetings—a message. You have it, Harald?—

  Harald has written, at Khulu’s dictation, on a page torn from the back of the notebook: UNGEKE UDLIWE UMZWANGEDWA SISEKHONA. He gives the piece of paper to Duncan.

  —Do you understand?—

  —The gist. I’ve picked up a bit of Zulu from him.—

  —What does it mean? You know he’s been with us nearly all the time.—

  He doesn’t answer his mother at once, not because he is unsure of the translation but because what it is, is hard to speak out in this hour, between the three of them.

  —Something like, you will never be alone because we are alone without you.—

  It’s been said for them, the parents, there is nothing more to be said. They clung to the rest of their precious time with their son, talking a surface made of matters meaningless to all three, which could at least hold above sheer fall.

  When it was time for the judge to convene the afternoon sitting of the court, one of the warders, a young Afrikaner, led them, and turned to regard Duncan.—He should eat something, lady. It’s no good on an empty stummick. Your mother wants you to eat something, man.—

  There has been, there is, no silence like the silence in a court when the judge lifts his head to hand down judgment. All other communication, within and without, is stilled; all is ended.

  This is the last word.

  She sits with hands trapped under her thighs as if in recognition of the irritation he has endured in being aware, in this place, the past days, of her beside him constantly turning the nail of her thumb under the rim of each nail. Khulu is with them. Khulu sits at her other side.

  And darkness fell upon the land.

  Each of the three is in the state of intense concentration that, as he, her husband, once tried to explain to her, was Simone Weil’s definition of prayer. He doesn’t know if he’s praying; there is doubt about everything for him. What is habit praying for now—twelve years could be the maximum, ten likely, Hamilton says seven, eight is the leniency expected—it’s implied—as the triumph of the Defence.

  He/she. They don’t look at their son now. There is no gaze able to reach him; the well of the court is not only the measure that sets him apart, in this enclosure within what everyone else experiences of the world—his progenitors, friends, the messenger Verster, the woman who knows we are all creatures of love and evil, are among them. Even Motsamai has done with him; whatever the bond was, the succour nobody, nobody else could give, it soon shall belong to the next client.

  A judge takes his time. There must be nothing precipitate about the law. Twelve years, if it is to be twelve years, there is no hurry to decide a verdict on what will take so long to serve.

  Does a sentence begin from the moment the verdict is pronounced, like the striking of a clock that signals a new hour to commence—My Lord Jesus Christ!—how demeaning it has been, all along, to be content to be an ignoramus, apparently immune from contact with the secular processes of crime and punishment! Only to have understood sins to be absolved by one of Your servants, mornings at confession. With great effort, he touches her arm and her hand comes out from suppression beneath the weight of her body so that he takes it. She has released the other hand, too. He is aware of Khulu’s slight side-glance on him, on her. He sees Khulu’s hand take this other hand.

  The judge is feeling for something in the recesses of his robes; it was a handkerchief. The judge blows his nose, working the cloth up into one nostril, wipes the comers of his lips, replaces the handkerchief.

  The judge looks out once, over the assembly, and then begins to address himself.

  —The accused, Duncan Peter Lindgard, is charged with murder, arising out of the killing of Carl Jespersen, a fellow resident on a communally-occupied property. The accused’s plea of not guilty is based on the defence of lack of criminal capacity, defined as temporary non-pathological incapacity.—

  Our son is not mad.

  —An accused person who submits non-pathological causes in support of a defence of criminal incapacity is required to lay a factual foundation sufficient for the court to decide the issue of the accused’s criminal responsibility for his actions having regard to the expert evidence and to all the facts of the case, including the nature of the accused’s actions during the period relevant to the alleged crime.

  The defence to the charges is that owing to extreme stress and provocation he had been unable to form the intention required to commit the alleged crime; unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions or act in accordance with such appreciation, and unable to engage in any purposeful conduct.—

  There is something salutary, necessary, for Harald and Claudia, perhaps even for their son himself, in this plain setting out of facts that, within themselves, have been so overgrown by emotion and entangled out of comprehension by distress.

  —The main events of the night of Thursday, January 18th, 1996, have been proved by evidence which is either common cause or not seriously disputed. A party took place with the arrival of friends of the occupants of the main house on the property, David Baker, Nkululeko Dladla, Carl Jespersen, and the occupants of the cottage on the property, Natalie James and the accused. The accused and Natalie cohabited as heterosexual lovers, the three men in the house were homosexuals, with Baker and Jespersen as a couple. Before his relationship with Natalie, the accused had had a homosexual relationship with Jespersen, but this does not appear to have affected the close friendship, the amicable sharing of what was virtually a single household by the five individuals.—

  And as he delivers the next statement the judge looks up, head lifted, straight out to the public assembly, for the first time.

  —They even owned and knew how to use, a gun, in common. —

  It is also a first hint of any personal attitude to the case. The context of the case. He has allowed himself the show of a brief ironic comment for those, like the father of the accused, who are sophisticated enough to interpret it as a shrug of disapproval of the household he has, dispassionately, and without prejudice on sexual mores, described. The significance of the shared gun (‘they even’) as a symbol of the shared interchangeable relations there distracts Harald as something he should have gone into, wanted to all along but that can’t be attended to now, no no, because every phrase that comes from this man is selective progress in the discourse of judgment, you must keep up with him, read between the lines (read his lips, of their intent) at the same time as you miss no single word. Harald wants to convey to Claudia and Khulu this attitude he sees purposely let slip by the judge, but there’s no time even to alert them with a glance.

  —When the party broke up that night and guests left, accompanied by Nkululeko Dladla, David Baker retired to bed in the house and the accused went to the cottage after an altercation with Natalie, who stayed behind, volunteering to assist Jespersen to tidy up and wash dishes.—

  He has his audience now. For all those others round the parents and their surrogate son Khulu, here is a drama addressed directly to them. They’ve seen in the flesh some of the characters; up there, on the witness stand. They are invited to share the right of familiarity the judge takes to himself, referring to one of the leading characters in the affair not as he does the men, by their surnames, but simply as ‘Natalie’, because she’s only a woman. If Claudia reads the lips of the man up there on the bench, his patronage is an aside unimportant to her today; or maybe for her it is all the respect from anyone this bitch should expect.

  —Some two hours later, the accused wakened in the cottage and found that Natalie had not returned. Concerned for her safety crossing the garden so late, he went to the house, where he came upon Natalie and Jespersen in flagrante delicto, engaged in the sexual act on the sofa in the living-room. They became aware of his presence but he did not confront them. He went back to the
cottage. Natalie did not come to the cottage; she took her car and drove away.—

  With the daring matter-of-fact of this account his attention has left his audience. His eyes are on his text again; let them contemplate the salacious scene he has just presented.

  —The accused, an architect, did not go to work on Friday, January 19th. He stayed in the cottage, alone, all day. Some time between 6.30 and 7 p.m.—he does not recall looking at his watch, and a gardener, the only witness that he went to the house, since he saw him return, does not own a watch—during that period the accused emerged from the cottage, fed his dog, and walked through the garden to the house. There, with the door open to the garden as it had been the night before, Jespersen was lying on the sofa drinking a sundowner. He made light of the incident of the previous night, claiming a shared brotherly context of the sexual mores of the communal household, and suggested that the accused join him with a drink.—

  No, no he didn’t feed the dog on the way to the house, that’s the way it’s been phrased to sound but it was to feed the dog, not to go to the house, that he left the cottage! This isn’t just a detail! It may be vital! The judge has let them down, deviated from the trust warily granted him. Claudia and Khulu are aware of a sudden surge of agitation in Harald but do not know its particular source. Claudia turns to Khulu, and he draws his face into planes of troubled assurance: it may be that Harald is momentarily overcome by the totality of where they are, what is actually taking place this day. The gun, that’s what the judge is bringing up now. He, Khulu, has held that gun, flipped it over in his hand, once or twice, yes.

  —The house gun, which had been produced as a demonstration model for one of the guests of the previous night who intended to acquire one, had been left lying on a table. With it, the accused shot Jespersen in the head where he lay. The shot was fatal. On his way back to the cottage the accused dropped the gun in the garden, where he was observed by Petrus Ntuli, a plumber’s assistant who worked as a part-time gardener on the property in exchange for accommodation in an outhouse. David Baker and Nkululeko Dladla came home shortly after and found the deceased’s body. They ran to the cottage to tell the accused but there was no response to their calls or knocking on the door, so they presumed he was not there. They called the police who in the course of searching the garden came upon Petrus Ntuli who told them the accused was in the cottage and that he, Ntuli, had seen him drop something on his way to the cottage from the house. The police found the gun, effected entry to the cottage, arrested the accused and took him to the police station for questioning. He was charged with murder. The gun, Exhibit 1, bears his fingerprints. —

  These are the facts—but what about the reasons for coming out of the cottage, what about the intention, the dog! The dog!

  —None of the facts has been disputed by the Defence. This granted, what the assessors and I have had to decide in handing down judgment is the validity of the claim of temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity submitted by the Defence on behalf of the accused. I cite, exceptionally, ‘on behalf of’ although it goes without saying that any counsel’s chosen defence is proxy for an accused, because in this case the accused has not taken the right to defend himself vociferously.

  He denies that he spent Friday in the cottage brooding on revenge against the deceased. He said in evidence ‘Revenge for what. I don’t own either of them, they are free to do as they like’—thus indirectly defending himself against premeditation of his crime, but he does not emphasize the responsibility the couple bore in gross violation of his feelings; he describes his reactions that night as something generated within, by himself, without attribution of blame to them. In reply as to whether he thought of any revengeful accusation, let alone action, against the couple, he said ‘All I could remember—about seeing them there like that—was … a disintegration of everything, disgust with myself, everyone …’

  Similarly, he makes no categorical denial, forcefully expressed, of the suggestion that when he walked across the garden to the house on Friday evening, he had the intention of confronting Jespersen. All he offered the court was the oblique statement ‘I found myself in the garden … I didn’t want to talk to anyone … I think then I had to find myself standing again where I stood in the doorway.’ He is referring to the previous night, when he came upon the couple. The Defence has interpreted this statement as standing for his disbelief—that is to say, what he saw in the house that night could not have happened; he had to go back, as if to verify the mise en scène. We unanimously find this interpretation acceptable. The State’s allegation that the accused spent the day of Friday, 19th January, premeditating revenge on the deceased is borne out neither by the content of the accused’s evidence nor the manner of his delivery, which, to those like myself and the assessors, accustomed to the tenor and timbre of lying, have the characteristics of truth.—

  A new tension—hope—holds the three. Harald and Claudia stiffen, recklessly afraid to let go, in any contact. It is so unexpected, this show of understanding by one who is judging Duncan, nothing contradictory to be read from the tips—is it at all usual for such empathy with an accused to be expressed in the course of a judgment? How can they know? Can’t ask the one who would: Motsamai, he’s unreachable in the well of the court beside his client. Harald hears Claudia’s fast breathing from a thumping heart. Their son is not mad and he is not a liar. What he says (and his body doesn’t contradict it) has the characteristics of truth. If Motsamai, Hamilton, could relay some answer?—does the truth count? Can the truth save you?

  And while these questions take height, they suddenly plummet again. What is the judge delivering himself of now? Motsamai, Hamilton!—is judgment a one-man game in which the player challenges himself, enjoys shifting conclusions to weigh down first one side of the famous scales, then the other?

  —Absence of premeditation, however, does not imply subsequent criminal incapacity in the actual perpetration of a crime, the series of actions by which a crime is committed at the time. If it is accepted that the accused went from the cottage to the house to convince himself that what he saw on the sofa in the living-room the previous nighr actually happened, only to look once again at the scene (the judge seems to lose concentration for a moment, preoccupied wearisomely with some matter surfacing in him from his own life, but perhaps he’s paused for effect, he’s a pro, they’re all pros, his assessors, his prosecution and defence teams) … what he actually saw was the man Jespersen, on that same sofa. There followed convincing evidence, confirmed by both State and Defence psychiatrists’ expert opinions, of a second profound shock, the outrage of Jespersen’s callous assumption that what happened the previous night before the accused’s eyes was trivial, to be passed off over a drink between men.—

  Like the arm on the shoulder, between Prosecutor and Defence Counsel in the corridors, passing over the scene in court where the one has been condemning a man and the other defending him. But Harald knows he should he the last one to be disillusioned by professional ethics; disillusion once begun, these days, here in this place, has ended up with his questioning his own.

  —It does not require any preparation of premeditation for a conscious and rational determination to take revenge to be suddenly aroused at such a moment. The means of revenge in such circumstances is most likely to be some form of physical attack, with bare hands or whatever may serve as a weapon. It is unfortunate that a deadly weapon, a gun, was casually accepted as part of the household in that living-room and that it was lying on the table.—

  How to follow the twists and turns, the swift about-face of what the man’s saying as he retreats and advances, down over his text, up to take them into his confidence again; there is the desperation of half-grasping a direction his mind is taking, only to have it snatched away as if attention has been disastrously lost for precious seconds—what did that mean, what was the order of words that are the clues to be followed to a verdict forming? Each loses the way and is impatient with anxiety to know if the ot
her has caught what is missing, and yet cannot risk to interrupt attention by whispering the question.

  —But the accused could have chosen bare hands; instead he chose to pick up the gun and shoot Jespersen in the head. He has said in evidence ‘The noise stopped.’ What he didn’t want to hear from Jespersen was silenced in the ultimate revenge, the taking of another’s life.—

  Not a liar, but a murderer.

  Claudia sees that her whole life was moving towards this moment. All the ambitions she had so naively decided she was going to fulfil, when she was a girl, all the intentions of dedication to healing she has had in her adulthood—they were to come to this. The end is unimaginable; if we knew it from the start we would never set out.

  —The District Surgeon’s report is that the shot was accurately directed to a vital part, the forehead, consistent with deliberate action. Whether this means a certain series of actions had to be consciously taken to aim and fire it, as the State submits, or whether, as the Defence submits, to the hand of anyone who is familiar with a gun the necessary preparation to fire comes automatically, without conscious volition, is now the crucial matter on which the question of criminal capacity, as the State submits, or temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity, as the Defence argues, must be considered, having regard to the expert evidence and all the facts of the case, including not only the nature of the accused’s actions during the period immediately relevant to the crime, but also the circumstances that preceded it in the personal history of the accused.—

  The sonorous maze of clauses dazes. Even the uttermost limit of attention which is prayer lands in dead ends, turns upon premises which it seems to have just left. During passages like this the ranks of spectators rustle. All the pros and cons are no business of theirs, they wait for the narrative to recommence, a judgment is the remnant of the oral tradition round the fire; they’re there to be told an exciting story.