The House Gun Page 7

  I don’t remember he ever had much reason to cry. A happy kid. Never what you’d call punished.

  She saw him when his face went into the scarlet paroxysm, white round the mouth, of childhood.

  Because that was always left to me.

  So you caused the tears.

  To answer back was to engage. She let the dog on his leash tug her forward. Both parents were concerned with the preservation of life. Even he, in a manner, assuring that people (at a profit, yes; but she also was paid for most of her services, wasn’t she) would be compensated for misfortunes that befell them, and, lately, providing money for the homeless to house themselves. The army—the army. That was where the life-ethic the son had absorbed from his parents was reversed. When he did his army service he was taught to kill; whether disguised as parade ground drill, field manoeuvres, ballistics courses (the calibre of the gun found in the bed of fern has been established), what was being given was licence to cause death. That there are circumstances in which this is justified by the law of both man and God—though God’s supposed sanction might not have worked its way in, for Duncan, because although Harald had made him a reader, had he succeeded in making him a believer?

  War, the right to take life: a truism.

  If Harald brings it up, he also tramps it out of relevance under their feet.

  Did he really see action? We know he didn’t, we thanked God he didn’t.

  You said to him the army was going to be a brutalizing experience.

  All right. The alternative we could have taken? You didn’t want us to send him away, did you? Out of the country. A brutalizing experience, a moral mess: but millions have resolved it. He only fired at targets.

  He told us they were in the shape of human beings.

  Something terrible happened.

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  A terrible thing happened. It was on Saturday, we were playing football, 2nd team, the one I’m in. A kid from junior school went into the gym to fetch something and suddenly there was screaming, we even heard it on the field. He saw someone hanging from the beam where the punch bag is. It was Robertse in Form 5. He was hanging by the neck. Old McLeod and the other masters went in but we were kept away. But we saw them bring out something carried in a blanket. There was an ambulance and the police. But we were told we must stay in our cubicles or the common room.

  The second page of the letter is lost, although she must have kept the letter as something whose validity was meant to outlast schooldays, boyhood. It was among documentation of the protection parents provide for a child, the commitments they assume, for him. Boosters for polio inoculation, record of orthodontic treatment, anti-tetanus and hepatitis inoculations as precautions taken when he went on some school camping trip in Zimbabwe. This letter came back to her, now, she went to look for it among these other bits of paper which, perhaps, there was really no reason to keep.

  When Claudia and Harald received that letter they had been strangely disturbed; she saw, now, that this was the forgotten other time, first time, they were invaded by a happening that had no place in their kind of life, the kind of life they believed they had ensured for their son. (A liberal education—whose liberalism did not extend to admitting blacks, like Motsamai, they realized now.) What could it be that led a schoolboy, a companion of their own son, protected in the same environment, the same carefully limited experience, the same selective civilized mores—they would not have confided Duncan to any school that practised corporal punishment—what could it be that brought a boy to put a rope round his neck? The contemplation was horror—once removed, that’s all. The unease they felt came from revealed knowledge that there are dangers, inherent, there in the young; dangers within existence itself. There is no segregation from them. And no-one can know, for another, even your own child, what these destructives, these primal despairs and drives are. Harald and Claudia—they could have been the boy’s parents, they were their clones, paying the same school fees, approving the enlightened educational philosophy of the worldly teaching staff, choosing a coeducational school so that a male child without sisters should mingle naturally with the other sex. What came to them was fear—fear that there could be threats to their son about which they could not know, could do nothing. They wrote to him—she wrote?—or they went to see him. She heard herself saying to Harald, I want you to tell Duncan, whatever happens to him, whatever he has done, no matter what, he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. We’re always there for you. Always. And so they could feel Duncan was safe. They had made him so.

  D’you remember that time with the Robertse boy, what you told Duncan.

  I remember you telling him, we got permission to take him out to lunch. We were in a garden restaurant somewhere—there was nowhere else to go. Didn’t seem the right place. Anyway.

  No, no, we’d gone over the whole thing, decided we must say something to him he wouldn’t forget, and you were the one.

  Why should it have been me? It came from his mother, that would be the obvious way.

  Because you’re the man and he was the boy. Perhaps the idea that you would have—I don’t know—some kind of shared male experience, something likely to happen, I wouldn’t have.

  What did it matter who uttered the pledge to the boy; it was made by both. It was the document produced when he said in the prison visiting room, I would have understood if you two hadn’t come back again.

  When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?

  Harald’s dependence on books became exactly that, in the pathological sense: the substance of writers’ imaginative explanations of human mystery made it possible for him, reading late into the night, to get up in the morning and present himself to the Board Room. He turned to old books, re-read them; the mise en scène of their time would remove him from the present in which his son was awaiting trial for murder. But like his son, he came upon his own passages, to be omnipresent in him if not to be copied out alongside the others in the notebook locked up in his office. “‘ … 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, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

  ‘Deepest desire?’

  ‘Deepest desire.’

  ‘It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together—as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, the one acting, the other suffering him—share a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other.’”

  Thomas Mann’s Naphta spoke to Harald in the silences that accompanied him everywhere: the accusatory silences, protectively hostile, between him and his wife; the silences he occupied even while he drew attention to anomalies in decisions being considered at business meetings or discussed the effect of new fiscal policies on the financing of mortgage bonds; susurration in the mind like a singing in the ears. The off-hand manner of the girl, at the lawyer’s chambers, when Motsamai said, You were afraid of him; and then—almost a boast—He was afraid of me. Afraid of each other?—in what is fearful, surely there is always one who menaces and one who fears. How can menace be equalled? In deadlock; and that is exactly what it will be, deadly; so if it had been Natalie/ Nastasya his son had killed there would have been an answer: they belong to each other. The reverse side of the conception of sexual love that romantically defines it as the blissful state of union, to which that good old-style marriage ceremony gives God’s blessing as one flesh. But he didn’t harm her; it was the man who lay, shot in the head, on the sofa, and it was known to the friends, to the lawyer, apparently to everyone, that he was not the first or the only other man she’d lain back on a sofa for, any one of them could have served as victim of the lover with whom she belonged in the intimacy of menace. There were times when Harald had the impulse to seek out the girl again, but Motsamai, who knew where to find her
, discouraged this.

  —I can’t afford to get her back up in any way, y’know what I mean, Harald, she feels that you and your wife blame her—

  —How could we blame her. He did what he did.—

  —Because you must blame someone. Your son in trouble. It’s human nature, nê? Because I must blame someone! His Counsel must prove circumstances that are causal, that will spread the guilt so that the burden of it rests on others who will never be arraigned.—

  In the surf of silence that is with him, here in the familiar room where innocence and guilt are annotated by paper slips in tomes —this chamber and the prison visitors’ room are extensions of his townhouse now—Harald knows: us. On us. Harald and Claudia, who made him: the birds and the bees, don’t steal another’s toy, never read other people’s letters, thou shalt not kill.

  —I have a very special kind of approach to her. Oh yes. Ah-hêh. —Motsamai’s lips struggle with something like amusement and self-approbation.—With women, you know; they’re very shrewd. And she, she turns on the charm—like a tap!—when she feels she’s being cornered. I have to coax her, without her realizing it, to condemn herself while she thinks she’s telling me about him. You have to know how to deal with such women. One moment they’re poor little victims, the next they’re showing off how they can dominate anyone and any situation. The weaker sex, they give us lawyers a lot of trouble. I can tell you.—

  Harald’s distaste for the assumption that he will share, as an aside casually confidential among males, a patronizing generalization about women, is something he has to dismiss. It doesn’t matter, now, what this man thinks about anything except the case he says he is defending. Prejudices seem unimportant. Duncan was taught not to be prejudiced against blacks, Jews, Indians, Afrikaners, believers, non-believers, all the easy sins that presented themselves in the country of his birth.

  —What did she tell you.—

  —Don’t take this too seriously—from her. She says he is a spoilt brat. Her words. A spoilt brat. She also uses big words, nê: ‘over-protected’, so that he’s not used to any opposition, anything that threatens his will, the way he thinks things ought to go. The rules are his rules—I questioned this, I suggested that the kind of set-up these young people have has no rules except perhaps the most basic ones, you know, who has the right to take the beer out of the fridge—and of course they had the black man Petrus Ntuli to do the dirty work for them. No, she says, his rules were made for himself, it didn’t mean they were the kind of conventional rules someone like me, a lawyer, would think of. Then what were they? Well, they were about who went with whom, and so on. Sex, I gather; but also friendship, she insisted, the set living on that property seem to have complicated friendships, what you’d call loyalties. He ‘went along’ with the way everyone lived on the property, he thought this coincided with his ideas, his rules, if you prefer, but at the same time he was the ‘spoilt brat’ who couldn’t tolerate it when this style—which he’d taken on for his own, mind you—came into conflict with the other rules he’d freed himself from. From the older generation. Yours. She says these were still there in him although he believed they were not. She said something: he’s in prison now, but he was never free. And of course she means she’s free.—

  —That doesn’t say much of what happened between them. From what you tell me, you’d think she had nothing to do with the couple there on the sofa.—

  —You’re right. You’re right! She somehow distances herself, that is so. Ah-hêh. And she seems to have, well, no feeling for the man who died as a consequence of her act with him that night. She doesn’t show any particular signs of sorrow … for this terrible thing. Which of course is very good, excellent for my case. When I cross examine her. She could have been the one to die. Why not? She doesn’t even consider it. Why not? It takes two, nê? To get going … Yet she shows no remorse that she was at least half the cause of the man’s death, if we grant that he was well aware that he was busy with his friend’s girl. It’s difficult to understand her detachment. As if she’s sure it wouldn’t have been her. I’m aware there are things I won’t get out of her, perhaps—not even with my means.—

  And he has a flashed laugh in appreciation of that skill, at once returning to the seriousness the face of the father, fixed on him, may trust.

  To recount what passed at a meeting like this with the lawyer means that Harald, who is informing her, and Claudia, who is the listener, both must first tell themselves again, as they must many times, every day, that Duncan has killed someone. Accept that. The man lay in the mortuary, there was a post-mortem which confirmed death by a bullet in the head, and he has now been buried at a funeral arranged by the friends with whom he shared the house; his body was not flown back to Norway, the man Duncan killed is still here, under Duncan’s home ground.

  Harald found Claudia talking on the telephone, making contrivedly interested enquiries and comments about someone else’s life; one of the kind friends who make a point of calling regularly to show that the Lindgards are still within society although something terrible has happened to place them out of bounds. She stares at him while she continues to talk and smile as if the friend could see her, not aware of what she is saying; she wants something he does not have, to give. The incongruity between the smile and the stare is anguish he has to harden himself to observe. He goes to the kitchen and watches the water overflowing the glass in his hand as a measure of time. When he comes back she is on the small terrace, waiting for him.

  How far has he got?

  What is the point of her aggression; as if he, along with the lawyer, were responsible for the lawyer’s request for postponement of the trial so that evidence may be prepared.

  We talked mostly about the girl. He finds her a complex character. She hasn’t a good word to say for Duncan—he’s a ‘spoilt brat’—but Motsamai seems to think there’s an advantage in that. It’s difficult for us to follow this kind of legalistic reasoning. He thinks he’s getting her to condemn herself out of her own mouth —something like that.

  Condemn herself—she’s not on trial! He wants to show you how clever he is. And were you satisfied that’s all? All he’s doing!

  It’s just that he sees her as a key prosecution witness. We have to trust his judgment, he quoted a stack of precedents for the kind of case he’s preparing. You and I know nothing about such things. We haven’t exactly had experience, have we, we could read about them in the newspapers or ignore they ever happened … He agrees with you, anyway, if not in so many words. She’s a bitch. The more he inveigles her to reveal herself the better his ‘extenuating circumstances’ can be cited. He says she’s entirely cold about the man who died, no conscience, not even the sense that she might have been the one in his place. So sure of herself, she wouldn’t be harmed whatever she did. God knows why.

  Because Duncan was in love with her.

  At what she has just said Harald feels a rising disgust, distress that he cannot suppress.

  So you believe in that kind of love, she fucks with another man, so her lover kills him! Proof of love. I thought you had a better opinion of your own sex, you’re responsible for your actions, as we men are. You call that love. Where did he get that love from!

  I’m trying to understand, Harald. Haven’t you been in love.

  What a bloody stupid question. You ask that. I was in love with you. I thought I would have died for you, though I suppose that was a safe illusion of youth, knowing I was unlikely to need to. But to imagine I would have killed anyone. Even myself. No. Love is life, it’s the procreative, can’t kill. If it does, it’s not love. It’s beyond me, beyond me to imagine what he felt for that woman.

  Then maybe he hates her. Punished her by doing away with the man she wanted. If you kill her you spare her suffering.

  We’re not talking about some euthanasia debate among doctors. As if he doesn’t know that if she loses one man she’ll find another.

  We were in love, you were in love with me, rather cra
zily, you say—what if you’d ever found me the way he found her?

  Claudia. How do I know. I can’t feel again as I would have felt, then. I would have walked away from you, we wouldn’t have been here, there would have been no Duncan—that’s what I say now. Oh but maybe I’d have claimed you back and fucked you myself, how do I know what I would have done, in love. Spoilt brat or not, that kind of love doesn’t come from me. I wouldn’t have taken anybody’s life.

  You can say that because we know now that you have to live on through any disaster.

  Could you have done it? There are women who say they’ve killed ‘for love’—what a question to you, who spend your life keeping people alive. What an insult, to ask.

  But it was more like a jeer.

  There are also women who when they have something to say that never should be said, raise their voices, fling out the words, and there are other women who are drop-voiced as if communicating with themselves and are overheard on such occasions. Claudia’s one of them.

  I understand now I’ve never been in love like that—crazily, as you say. Never.

  Stop the clocks, lock the doors, but every summer night there is repeated the afterglow they used to come out to enjoy as it raised the sky with light from the bonfire of the day. Another day; awaiting. They still come out. Awaiting trial. They pass the newspaper between them as people do who are not on speaking terms but recognize one another’s presence. They are here, there is no remedy. When there were the usual disappointments and setbacks in their lives—small, small, dwindled to the trivial—they would come home and burrow into each other in bed. He drinks his nightly alcohol ration while the birds (Black-faced Weavers, common to the region) make conversation like foreigners in a bar.