The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer Page A

could recall her to her patients at any time of day or night) this might look like a thoughtless reminder that out there, outside the walls and lookouts with armed guards, people were walking on grass under trees, the Strelitzias were perched in bloom over the townhouse terrace where his parents sat in summer, the man Petrus Ntuli was watering the bed of fern. She dressed, finally without awareness of it, to please him. To be the kind of mother he would want; neither expressive of the judgmental conventions of a parental generation nor attempting to project into his own, to reach him by trying to look young—she knew that she sometimes took unwise advantage of the fact that she did look younger than forty-seven to choose clothes that were meant for younger women. What she wore should confirm: whatever happens, whatever you do, you can always come to me.
    Duncan did not remark on Harald’s absence; it was as if he expected her. She was the one to bring up the circumstance of his father’s obligation to respond to an invitation from a government ministry. He sends his love. It was the line scribbled as an afterthought at the end of a letter, even if the supposed message had never been requested to be conveyed.
    He said he’d heard something about the conference, on the radio. This tenuous connection somehow bewildered her, as if what he was claiming was a faint voice from the earth being received by someone strapped in a space craft. She could not picture how someone would sit—no there would be no chair in a cell—lie on a mattress on the floor and listen to the living going on. Outside.
    She had not noticed, on previous prison visits, that Duncan
raised and lowered his eyelids, slowly, while others—she and Harald—spoke to him. It was not blinking, exactly. It was a patient, distant, stoically fanning movement. He hears us out. She was observing him much more intently and clearly this time than she had done before. When Harald was there, she and Harald had between them sensors invisibly extended, like the raised hairs on certain creatures that pick up the impulses of others towards them, which distracted from perception of their son. Each was tense to what the other’s reactions to him were; there was static interference with the reception coming from the son.
    Harald was not there; after a number of visits, it was as Motsamai had said, the warder was no more than the presence of the scarred and scored wood of the table. On it, she was suddenly able to take both Duncan’s hands in hers. She had always admired his hands, so unlike her own with their prominent knuckles and leached skin of doctors and washerwomen; when he was a small child she would spread his fingers and his long thumbs and display them to Harald, look he’s got your hands (and laugh cockily) I made sure he didn’t get my own, didn’t I. She turned them palm-up, now, in that gesture, but he pulled them away and made fists on the table, throwing his head back.
    Claudia was appalled. That he should have thought the gesture was a reminder of what he had done with those hands. Here, to him, in this place, you could not explain to him, this was one of those female reminiscences, sentimental, indulgent, that adult progeny rightly find an unwelcome fetter and a bore. It was a moment to get up and run from a room. But this wasn’t that kind of room. Walk out, you can’t walk in again. Can’t come back until the next appointed visiting day. This is not home, where misunderstandings used to be explained away.
    The irreparable made her reckless.
    â€”You’ve told him you’re guilty. The lawyer. I can’t believe you.—
    â€”I know you can’t.—He moves his head from side to side, side to side, it’s measuring the four walls, he’s enclosing himself in
the walls of the prisoners’ visiting room. She has never seen the cell where he is kept but he has its dimensions about