The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Why is Duncan not in the story? He is a vortex from which, flung away, around, are all: Harald, Claudia, Motsamai, Khulu, the girl, and the dead man.

His act has made him a vacuum; a vacuum is the antithesis of life. If they cannot understand how he could do what he did, neither does he. Except the girl; she might, she would. She was prepared to kill; herself. That’s the nearest you could get to the act upon another. The act itself, not the meaning. He does not remember the act itself; the lawyer believes him or wants to, needs to believe him, but the prosecutor, the judge and the assessors, whoever it is who will be told this will not believe him. He did not, in the words of the lawyer’s question, ‘premeditate’ what he did. It was enacted so quickly, a climax that is over, the unbearable emotion out of grasp, gone. He can follow the sight of the gun lying there, but that is the night before, some idiot was talking of buying one and had asked to be shown how to use the thing. The house gun. It was always somewhere about, no use having it for protection if when the time came no-one would remember where it was safely stashed away. He can see it put down, forgotten, on the table among the bottles and glasses, the night before. And when they—Jespersen, Natalie, the two of them—washed the dishes, cleared up, made love on the sofa, they left it there. The time came. They left it there for him.

He doesn’t see it when he follows how he found them. Exactly how he found them is clear in every detail. They’re both dressed (that’s the way she likes it), only their genitals offered each to the other, her skirt bunched out of the way and his backside still half-covered by his pants as he’s busy inside her. They egg each other on with the sounds that are, he can’t stop himself hearing, familiar to him from both of them, and at the very moment they realize someone has come upon them they are seized by what they can’t stop, it’s happening in front of him, it seems to him that’s what it’s always like, if you could see yourself, a contortion, an epileptic fit. He fled from it. He thought he heard her laughing and crying. He sat in the dark in the cottage waiting for her to feel her way in and say, That’s all there is to it, so! But this time it’s not all there is to it.

How many nights in their terrible hours after their good hours, middle of the night had she stood over him shaking her head of flying hair, a Fury (oh yes, put me on a pillar or something in your Greek classical post-post-modern whateveritis architecture) laughing and crying—they’re the same to her—and bending to him as if he were deaf: ‘You faggot! Why don’t you go

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