The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

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.
    Spoilt brat.
    She looked up, at the quotation.
    Oh that’s passing the buck from adult responsibility for what you do. The toilet-training syndrome. I would never have tolerated a child of mine as spoiled.
    â€˜Spoilt’. Over-indulged. Chocolate and toys. But there’s another meaning to the word; to spoil something is to damage it for good. Like that burn in your carpet.
    You know everything—you’ve read everything, do people
commit crimes out of self-hatred? Is it true? Isn’t that another explanation people give? Why should he hate himself? What had he done to make him able to do what he did.
    He passed her another section of the paper and returned to the pages he had. To think—thinking—of things to which were given only a moment’s skimming attention, before: an intelligent person reads selectively, no real interest in following the sex adventures of pop stars or the lurid crimes that must have been performed by the deranged. But now—here was that woman who strapped her two small children into their safety seats in her car and got out and let it run off a wharf into the water, drowning them.
    Other people! Other people! These awful things happen to other people.
    It doesn’t matter whose thoughts these were, Harald’s or Claudia’s; they were in the evening air on the terrace, they were in the rooms of the townhouse like the clinging odour of cigarette smoke in curtains and upholstery.
    He was aware that he and she were thinking of these things in terms of happening to the perpetrator, not the victim: as if the motive, the will, came from without. But it came from within. ‘The man is what he wished to be, he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’

C laudia went alone to the prison. Harald was a delegate to a conference of bankers and insurance brokers called by the Minister of Economic Development; he could not continue to subordinate everything in his engagement book to the susurration in his mind: without the outward performance of normal occupations life could not be even materially sustained. Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, the stranger to whom he was coupled in the processes of the law, would cost six thousand rands a day for appearance in court, and half as much for time spent working on the case in his chambers.
    Claudia found herself considering what she should wear; as if, without Harald, there would be a concentration on her presence in which her clothes would reveal an attitude—to her son—her attitude. In winter she wore trousers, shirt and pullover under the white coat of her working day, in summer a cotton skirt and whatever went with it was in the shops each year, she liked to be in contemporary fashion while her profession was old as human history. The healer does not have to be dowdy; the ancients, like sangomas and shamans of the present, wore beads and feathers. If
she went to the prison in her work clothes this would, in a sense, be fancy dress; she would not be consulting at her rooms that morning. If she put on the kind of outfit she wore when she attended some medical conference (as Harald wore a dark suit for his) or went to a restaurant with Harald at the invitation of one of his colleagues, it would seem undue respect granted to the authority of the grim place that held her son. If she wore the jeans of her weekend leisure (a euphemism, a doctor’s beeper