The House Gun

by Nadine Gordimer

  Hamilton Motsamai is smiling as he rises. There’s a slight inclination of the body that might be a bow in the direction of the Prosecutor.—M’Lord, the accused has not been brought before some commission on public morals, but before your court on a charge of murder.

  With your permission, there is no charge preferred against him as the representative of a section of society.

  He cannot be brought to account for encouragement of robberies, hijackings and rape so regrettably common in this time of transition from long eras of repression during which state brutality taught violence to our people generations before the options of freedom in solving life’s problems were opened to them. I ask M’Lord’s indulgence for this last digression …

  The climate of violence bears some serious responsibility for the act the accused committed, yes; because of this climate, the gun was there. The gun was lying around in the living-room, like a house cat; on a table, like an ashtray. But the accused bears no responsibility whatever for the prevalence of violence; the court has accepted undeniable evidence that he had never before displayed any violent tendencies whatever, and heaven knows there were occasions when life with that young woman might have expected it. He was, indeed, a citizen who—to appropriate a term from my Learned Friend—upheld ‘acceptable standards’ of social order. His conduct condoned neither hijacking, robbery nor rape.

  We are left with the conclusion that my Learned Friend is himself making a moral judgment on sexual preference, sexual activity, specifically homosexual activity when he speaks of the accused’s co-occupancy of ‘a house where none of the acceptable standards of order’ was maintained. He thus classifies sexual relations along with the lack of proper care of a dangerous, a lethal weapon as equal examples of transgression of such acceptable standards.

  M’Lord, the accused has not appeared before you on a charge of homosexual activity with a consenting adult; neither could this be a charge, under the new Constitution, where such relations are recognized as the right of individual choice. Homosexual relationships, such as existed in the common household, are commensurate with ‘acceptable standards’ in our country.

  The court has made a majority decision that the murder to which the accused has admitted was not premeditated. While regarding with its privilege of learned scepticism the conflicting testimonies of the psychiatrists, the court has come to its own opinion that, nevertheless, the crime was committed in a state of criminal responsibility and declared this decision in judgment. Yet there remains that in the course of the trial there has been much debate on this vital issue, and debate, it must be admitted, implies that a certain degree of doubt, a question mark, hangs over it. This degree of doubt merits being taken seriously as augmenting the consideration of extenuating circumstances granted in the judgment.

  Ah-hêh … Finally—when calling for a sentence commensurate with the wrong-doing of the individual, the State needs to keep in mind the philosophy of punishment as rehabilitation of an individual, not as condemnation of the putative representative of society’s present ills whose punishment therefore must be harsh and heavy enough to deal with collective guilt. Our justice has suspended the death sentence; we must not seek to install in its place prejudices that inflict upon any accused punishment in addition to, in excess of that commensurate with the crime he has committed, and the circumstances in which it was committed,. The mores of our society are articulated in our Constitution, and our Constitution is the highest law of the land. My Learned Friend for the State speaks with the voice of the past.—

  Now there begins some preamble from the judge that will not be remembered with any accuracy because all sense is deafened in strain towards what was going to come from him: the last word.

  —I have listened carefully to Counsel both for State and Defence. It should have been clear to both Counsel that the proper sentence in this case to be imposed by this court is not dependent upon the convicted person’s social or sexual morals. My function is to impose a sentence which is just both to the victim and the accused. A life has been lost. And as expression of my displeasure at the manner in which the gun in question was held without consideration of safe-keeping, I declare this gun forfeited to the State.

  Although there are unusual and exceptional circumstances in this case the sentence must have a deterrent effect. The value of human life is primarily enshrined in our Constitution. The question of sentence is a very difficult one; it must not only act as a deterrent but there must also be a measure of mercy. After very careful consideration I sentence you, Duncan Peter Lindgard, to seven years imprisonment.

  The court will adjourn.—

  The last word. Handed down to the son, to his parents, to the assembled representatives of those other judges, the people of the city.

  Over.

  A decompression, a collapse of the nerves, a deep breath expelled—like the one that left Harald’s spirit when the messenger brought news something terrible has happened: but this coming full circle, as it were, expelling the breath of relief. Over.

  Even the period with him, Duncan, down in that place below the court afterwards, when all the others who had been around them and who had heard out the judgment, the sentence pronounced, seven years, had trooped out of the court, filed past them respectfully, Verster the messenger pausing a moment as if to speak, not speaking, another—a woman—leaning swiftly to say, Thank God (someone aware it might have been twelve years)—even while with their son, there was this strange remission. The three exchanged shyly and gently the banalities of concern for one another, Are you all right mother, dad why don’t you sit down. Motsamai was there—in the persona of Hamilton again, shepherding the parents, how could they have done without him this one last time. On the way along corridors, he had undertoned gravely in the manner of delivery with which habitually he approached, surged to express, and overcame dangerous subjects—I must tell you we are very, very fortunate. You can’t imagine. It is the most lenient sentence possible. In my entire experience. The minimum given in a case such as Duncan’s. Seven years. We couldn’t have got away with less; it was my ambitious aim, but then one never knows, even with the right judge, about the assessors. Those fellows, sometimes! Ah-hêh. Man! If they concur on vital aspects in opposition to the judge! He has to take due cognizance … Well, here were lambs, little sheep followed him, hardly a bleat, nê.—Now it was an effort for him to keep his mood down to their subdued level although he was familiar with the way individuals stunned by the ordeal of a trial mistake their state for a kind of peace that one doesn’t want to disturb. It is the mood in which he has seen other murderers vow a religious conversion. —Duncan won’t serve the full term. Definitely not. Good behaviour, studies and so on—I suppose you could still take some other degree in your line of profession, Duncan, of course you can. He’ll be out by the time he’s—how old are you now, again, Duncan, twenty-seven?—out by the time he’s thirty-two. That’s a young man still, isn’t it? He’ll put it behind him.—

  Hamilton also has plans. For them there was only the relief, Duncan is no longer the target standing set apart in the dock, strangers in intrusion of the most private event of their lives no longer press around them; they have no awareness further than this, in the twenty minutes, half-hour perhaps, with him, no sense of its limit and what waits beyond it.

  Counsel knows the devastating emotions relatives and the newly-convicted are subject to when they meet for the first time, which is a new time, after it is all over. Hamilton has to control his empathy, which exists along with his professional satisfaction in an extremely dubious case well defended by one of the best advocates available. He is there to support, to help them accept in themselves, between themselves and himself, the natural expression of emotions. Among his people (he would term it, in our culture) a mother would be wailing. And how. Why not. But these poor people—that little bitch was right in this instance—middleclass whites whose codes of behaviour they are sure are enlightened and free, are the ones that can co
ntain everything in life and so should, in respect of everybody! Their son, poor boy, got himself into a mess that wasn’t covered. And they themselves don’t know what it is to respond to what is happening to them now. They show no emotion, just a distanced kindness towards one another.

  No wailing from this mother. It is only—unexpectedly—the father who suddenly gets up from the chair he has been considerately offered and takes his son by the shoulders. A curious ugly sound between a cough and a cry, as if he were gagging comes from him. His wife the doctor seems able to make no move. Hamilton lets him alone in this, his moment. Only when he’s turned away, his face in a dry rictus, does Hamilton go over and put an arm around him.

  Harald had looked at Duncan in his calculatedly casual-fitting jacket and baggy grey trousers, the convention of unconventionality that had not prejudiced a worldly judge, and realized this was the last time he would be wearing these. Next time (and time is seven years) it would be prison clothes.

  Over.

  It’s beginning.

  Khulu was waiting for them on the steps of the courts. He walked with them in silence towards the parking lot. They tramp like prisoners, every footstep grinds. Motsamai’s—Hamilton’s task was successfully concluded now, he would be the go-between of Duncan and the prison authorities, but there would be little need for him to seek out or receive the parents, a successful Senior Counsel is a busy man. They stood a moment, delivered to their car. Claudia spoke for them both, to Khulu—Let’s not lose sight of each other.

  A prison is darkness. Inside. Inside self. It’s a night that never ends, even under the strip light’s bristling glare from the cell ceiling. Darkness even while, through the barred window reached by standing on the bed: the city trembling with light. That’s anticipation. That’s what’s gone. There is nothing calling, nothing you are waiting for.

  I am a rag on a barbed wire fence. You should have left me there.

  A letter from Natalie?

  I am a rag

  on a barbed wire fence

  You

  should have left me there

  No—no such thing as a letter from her; something she once wrote. One of the scraps she would leave for him to find anywhere at all, on the dashboard shelf of the car, beside the tub in the bathroom. Her affectation; her communication.

  She could have been a writer. Her candle flame. Could have been the writer, the architect, the ‘creative’ couple. The family foursome, how satisfactory: along with the doctor and the provider of housing loans for the homeless. Affordable—there’s that word coined for our time, for what you can get out of it without going too far for safety, good old Khulu’s way to acceptance: he’s affordable by white males, in their beds.

  She could have been a writer. To have put her to work in an advertising agency, inventing jingling fashionable lies to make people buy things they must be persuaded, brain-washed to need, want—this was the betrayal of that possibility. She showed contempt for my choice by doing something outrageous instead of using words against me because I’d debased words, for her, finally. I’d shut her up.

  It wasn’t her, it was him I shut up finally.

  Always trying to win her round by bolstering her confidence in herself (that was it) imagining that by praising, always telling her how intelligent she is—

  She laughed: How do you measure your dog’s intelligence? By how it obeys commands!

  The city’s body-smell of urine and street-stall flowers. Not yet winter. Not even autumn quite passed, up at the window.

  Jagged end.

  What’s that. Not something of hers, again. No.

  Jagged end of a continent.

  L’Agulhas.

  It was with Carl, there. The sea shimmering into the shallows as the tide rose; rocks (L’Agulhas, ‘the needles’ in Portuguese, he explains, the Northerner who amuses himself by teaching the Southerner what he ought to know about his own country). The rocks bloodied in lichen. It was exciting, the two of them with the weight and distance of the continent behind them, sitting on the edge of existence there. They are only just out of reach of the heaving anger of the two oceans as the powers of opposing currents clash, Indian and Atlantic. With her—oh it was another place, the Indian alone from which she was dragged back to breathe. At the Atlantic it was with him. Where the two oceans meet, it’s fatal. With Carl, come to the end of it all. When that happened someone picked up the gun and shot him in the head.

  Jagged end.

  Those who want an eye for an eye, a murderer for a murderer; they won’t put it behind him. Harald does not know whether in this conviction, of which Claudia is probably and mercifully ignorant, he should offer: Perhaps he could go and practise in another country.

  Out of something terrible something new, to be lived with in a different way, surely, than life was before? This is the country for themselves, here, now. For Harald a new relation with his God, the God of the suffering he could not have had access to, before. Claudia—she came out with something that plunged him into the disorientation within her, which he had not realized.

  Perhaps we should try for a child.

  That she should allow herself to turn to this illusion, a doctor, forty-seven years old … what hope could there be of conception, another Duncan, in her body.

  I’m not menopausal yet.

  He was tumescent with her pain, he made love to her anyway, for the impossibility. It was the first time since the messenger entered the townhouse and it was unlike any love-making they had experienced ever before in their life together, a ritual neither believed in, performed in bereaved passion.

  The first months moved past them. Then old routines began to draw them along, in a return: the old contacts of every day, the context of responsibilities, faces, documents, decisions affecting others, whether to prescribe this or that antidote for someone else’s kind of pain, whether the rise in bank rates could be contained without raising the monthly payments on housing loans, decisions in which a man dead on a sofa, a trial, seven or five years, had no relevance. Nothing else for it; nothing else for them. Only, in place of the usual leisure activities, the visits, the drive out of town is to another city, where long-term sentences are served.

  A business colleague invites Harald to lunch. The man has just recovered from double bypass surgery on a heart blocked by thickened blood, and he eats all the richest choices on the menu. It seems to have been some kind of demonstration; he says, smiling, for Harald:—You have to die.—It’s a delicate way of referring to and offering consolation for disaster, all suffer it one way or another, we’re all people in trouble.

  Harald and Claudia are taken up again in their own circle, no reason to keep contact with that communal household, that cottage no doubt occupied by new tenants. Baker, in whose bedroom in the house the gun was supposed to be out of reach, hardly could be expected to face in that living-room the parents of his lover’s murderer, even if they could have brought themselves to be there. And Claudia had never entered the cottage after the messenger had told what he had to tell. The personal belongings of the previous tenant have been removed to the townhouse by a professional firm. Apparently as a mark of consideration, fellow occupants of the townhouse complex have not complained to Harald and Claudia that the continued presence of the dog is against the rules.

  They have lost touch with Khulu. Unfortunately. Just as you lose touch with the one who is shut away from the course of your life long determined, so the circumstances that surrounded the period of crisis in that one’s life produced their own strange intimacies which do not belong with the necessity of taking up daily life as you know how to live it. They haven’t seen Motsamai again. Khulu visits Duncan—Duncan says, or rather this comes out in passing, in the exchange that takes place on a tacit level which avoids certain references and unanswerable questions, between him and his parents when they visit. Exchange of personal news; for Duncan now has his kind of news, he has completed the plan he was working on, a detailed favourable report from fello
w architects on the project has come back (virtue of Motsamai’s buddy relations with the prison commandant). Next visit, he can tell that he has permission to start studying for an advanced diploma in town planning. And the following month it is that he is—yes—taking on care of his health by working-out in his cell night and morning. He makes them laugh a little at the idea of his makeshift gym.

  He looks well.

  If somehow different from the way they carry his image within them, as some people carry a photograph in a wallet as an identification of commitment; his face carved more boldly, roughly, and the tendons showing in the neck of that prison garment those of a man older than twenty-seven. It’s the way, when he was at boarding school, there was a visage, an outline in the mind that was not quite that of the boy they visited at the school; took out for lunch, when there was occasion to talk to him seriously about something.