The House Gun

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 back to one of your boys! Go on, go over to the house if I don’t suit you, you want to make me over, Mr Godalmighty.’ She, to whom everything was permissible, would not hesitate to abuse him for what she actually regarded as of no account. In confidence in the freedom of experience, of emotions, she professed and practised, he had done what he never should have — told her of the incident, no, be honest, it was more than that: the time with Jespersen. Given her a weapon to whirl above his head, hold at his throat, and when she saw in him the reaction she wanted, whip away as a big joke.

The awful torrent of her ranting came back to torture him in the cell. She had him cornered there. The most articulate being he had ever known, a kind of curse in her. You dragged me back you made me puke my death out of my lungs you revived me after the madhouse of psychopath doctors you plan you planned to save me in the missionary position not only on my back good taste married your babies because I gave mine away like the bitch who eats the puppy she’s whelped develop ‘careers’ you invent for me because that’s what a woman you’ve saved should have you took away from me my death for that for what you decide I live for said I must stop punishing myself but here’s news for you if I stay with you it’s because I choose I choose the worst punishment I can find for myself I revel in it do you know that

It does not end there. It flows from all the nights they talked until three in the morning, high on her words, they hardly needed anything else. And all the time while she enraged and flayed him — he heard again what he had thrown at her in place of a blow of his hand against her mouth, one violence resisted only for another: I should have let you die. I wish I had let you die — he had been aware in the most intense sorrow of lines she had written for him in one of her poems ‘I’m a candle flame that sways/in currents of air you can’t see./You need to be the one/who steadies me to burn.’ He had not done this for her; he was not the one.

I should have let you die.

Does this mean he wanted to kill her. Look back on his Eurydice he had brought from the Shades, so that she could follow him no more. Rid of her and loving her so much; choosing her disastrously as she said she chose him.

That would have been premeditated. How many times had he stayed the hand that was to go out against her mouth. She was right when she taunted him about his middle-class background; what’s it all about but docility, she laughed. Your parents — a pair of self-righteous prigs. Your father took you to church, he’s a confessing Christian but real Christians are rebels they’ve gone to prison for what they see is wrong instead of taking their piddling little sins to the priest behind the curtain pretending to stand in for God up in heaven. Your mama’s a good liberal, which means she deplored, oh yes, what went on in this country in the old days and let other people risk themselves to change it.

And you (had he said it to her) you think you are an anarchist, and anarchy has no form, it’s chaos you are, and it’s what I’ve left my drawing board for.

All day in the cottage waiting for her to come back and she did not. Other times when there’d been an affair, she disappearing for a few days somewhere, she had reappeared with the little carryall that was provision enough for a weekend with a lover, she had been unapologetic (she was a free being) but calm, obviously pleased to see him. Once she even brought him a souvenir she had collected, a fossil fragment. She could get away with such improbable gestures. There had followed a night of talk. He desired her strongly all through it but did not want to be so soon where another man had been. After a day or two they made love again, and for her it was as if nothing had intervened. That’s all there is to it.

At last, in the late afternoon he got up from their bed where he had lain all day and went over to the house. But first, the strange ordinary movements gone through, he opened a can of pet food, placed it in a bowl outside the door; the dog prancing and leaping about him in anticipation, the simple joy of appetite, existence. He went to the house. He didn’t want to speak to anyone but he heard himself in silent monologue and this time the words were not to be in the middle of the night and not with her. He did not know what he was saying, going to say. He was aggrieved right to the back of his throat, stopped up there. If he had any purpose at all it was to know what whoever was listening to his silence would say. It was Jespersen. Jespersen was lying on the same sofa.

So he came upon him again.

The man lifted his head and smiled, opening his eyes wide under cocked brows and pulling down the comers of his mouth, his familiar attractive representation of culpability in the style of an accomplished mime. What he said was: Oh dear. I’m sorry, Bra. The form of address picked up from the black frequenters of the communal house came in handy to assert between the two of them overall brotherhood which would absorb any transgressions.

It was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.

Bewilderment exploded; he had not had in mind anything but her, she was what was filling him right up to the source of speech, she was what he was carrying before him in accusation, the corpse of his emotions. With the enactment of those words, that facial gesture there came the stun of that previous blow, he felt again, saw lying there relaxed in one of those remembered Japanese cotton gowns and flexing the toes of a muscular foot in favoured sandals, the tom bereavement of that rejection which he had long thought of as a forgotten phase in the evolvement that living is, as the passions and frustrations of adolescence dwindle to their minor proportions. It was Jespersen who was lost; lost in the body of the girl. Jespersen too, was the corpse of life. This man had himself destroyed it all, everything, the meaning of himself and the meaning of the girl, in the contortions, the hideous fit of their coupling.

Talk. Jespersen with his sing-song Norwegian English talked reason that was obvious. We are not children. We don’t own each other. We want to live freely don’t we. We shouldn’t stifle impulses that bring people together, whether it’s going to be sex or taking a long walk, never mind, eh. The walk is over, the sex is over, it was a nice time, that’s it, isn’t it. Just unfortunate we were a bit too impulsive. I mean, she’s a girl who usually arranges things more privately, doesn’t she. All of us know it … you know it, my Bra. It hasn’t changed things with you and her before. You see, you should never follow anyone around, never, that’s a mistake, that’s for the people who make a prison out of what they feel and lock someone up inside. If it hadn’t turned out the way you made it turn out, she’s a great girl you’ve got, she would never have given it another thought and me too, for me no claims just part of the good evening we had, the drinks, the laughs she and I had cleaning up together. Why don’t you help yourself to a drink.

Talk.

All through the talk there was another babble going on inside him as if the tuning knob of a transistor were racing from frequency to frequency, snatches and blarings of the past, of the night, other nights, despair, self-hatred, inexpressible tenderness, raw disgust, insupportable rage for which there was no means of order. The communications of the brain were blown. He could not know what it was he thought, felt under the talk, talk, talk. It was the grand apocalypse of all the talk through all the nights until three in the morning. It was that he must have put an end to when he picked up the house gun left lying in his peripheral vision and shot their lover, his and hers, in the head.

That’s all there is to it.

Of course he would never do such a thing. So that is why there is nothing to explain to those poor two when they come to sit with him in the visitors’ room. What there was, is, in himself he did not know about, they certainly did not, cannot know. The clever lawyer must make up an explanation. We are now in your hands, Bra. It was the lawyer who told him the post-mortem confirmed that Carl, Carl Jespersen, was dead of a gunshot in the head. That was how he came to believe it. He had not seen Carl bleed. He had not waited to see what picking up the house gun had done. He had fled as he fled into the garden when he overturned and broke a lamp in his mother’s bedroom as a child. If the death sentence is to be carried out perhaps the brain should go to research; maybe there is an explanation to be found there that might be useful. To society. All he can do for the two in the visitors’ room is hope that society won’t subject them to much publicity when the trial begins. He has status as a big-business target for the journalists in one sector, she has status as a target in the sector of good works for humanity; people will like to see what press photographers can show of people of status whose son has done what he never could do. But perhaps it will go unnoticed, what is an indoor killing (homeground in the suburbs), lovers’ obscure quarrel, gays’ domestic jealousy, something of that kind, in comparison with the spectacular public violence where you can film or photograph people shot dead on the streets in crossfire of the new hit-squads, hired by taxi drivers and drug dealers who have learnt their tactics from the state hit-squads of the old regime with its range of methods of ‘permanently removing’ political opponents, from blowing them up with car and parcel bombs to knifing their bodies again and again to make bloodily sure bullets have done their work.

If something could be found in the lobes of the brain to explain how all, all these, like himself, could do these things; continue to wound and savage and, final achievement of it all, kill.

A house gun. If it hadn’t been there how could you defend yourself, in this city, against losing your hi-fi equipment, your television set and computer, your watch and rings, against being gagged, raped, knifed. If it hadn’t been there the man on the sofa would not be under the ground of the city.

He was a happy boy. Wasn’t he. Claudia did not have to ask Harald that question. Of course he was. What did they have to recall from what — the lawyer attributed to them — they ‘thought over and done with’. As if there were to be something hidden; from him; from themselves. What did Duncan want of them. What did he need of them.

Have you still got the letter?

One of those box files in the old cupboard we brought when we moved. But there’s only the first page.

Yes, he remembered; they had thought of it, unavoidable, in all their confusion after that Friday night. A terrible thing happened the boy wrote. They had accused each other over who was or was not responsible to tell their son we’re always there for you. Always.

I was thinking it might be something for Hamilton. But I suppose not. It didn’t show any particular shock, the boy seemed to have dealt pretty well with whatever the business of that child hanging himself meant to him. We were the ones who were so disturbed.

That he didn’t write that way doesn’t mean he didn’t feel it. Upset, afraid.

But he couldn’t write it to us. Yes. Why.

Children don’t say things outright. They offer some version for grownups to interpret. I know that from when I’m trying to diagnose a child.

Harald lifted his head and his gaze wandered the room, in denial, seeking. One of them — Claudia, himself, that silly self-justifying argument they’d had — both of them had made the covenant with the boy, There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. But he had not been able to tell them anything that was leading him towards that Friday night when something terrible happened to him. He had not told them that he loved a man, or at least desired him, explored that emotion, although he had been taught to give expression to his emotions, nonsense that boys don’t cry. He had not told them that he had brought a girl from the water, lived with her in conflict with her embrace of death. He introduced young women for a drink on the terrace of the townhouse; an hour of talk about public events in the city, holidays, politics maybe, exchange of anecdotes and laughter, of opinions of a book both he and his father had read — and they might or might not see the woman again. This one whom he had taken in apparently permanently they had not seen much more of; he would walk in alone, you are always at home to your own son, and sit down to eat with them. Then there would be an old form of intimacy, a recognition between the three of them, you might call it, they would talk together in that privacy of family matters, their experiences in the different worlds of their work, he would tell his mother it concerned him that she worked such long hours and discuss with his father the possibility that he might hive off from the firm in which he was employed and start his own architectural practice more in accordance with his aesthetic directions. Once Harald had asked, You’re in love with this girl, and he had seemed to welcome the admittance coming from without. — I suppose I am.—

But to say that was to be saying love was difficult; there were difficulties. Harald, Claudia should have read that. But there was freedom, his right to his own privacy: their form of love for him.

The covenant meant nothing.

It had been the most important commitment in their lives. Without it all the people whose old age she eased and the men, women and children whose wounds of many kinds she tended, were nothing, and without it all Harald’s love of God was nothing. And if he could have, no, would have come to them, would they have been able to stop in time, what happened? At what stage in the disorder that was taking over his life could that have been done? What — when — was the point before no return; when the girl was resuscitated — the basic form of ‘saved’—could he have been prevented, protected, from taking on to ‘save’ her in the final sense, in reconciliation to life? While it was obviously the self-destruction that was her dynamo, the very energy itself that attracted him to her?

Or was there a point earlier, predating the girl. They thought — all this often surfaced and was spoken between them — about the homosexual episode. If it was that: an episode. Was that something at which a halt should have been called, was it to be seen, diagnosed, as a beginning of disintegration of a personality — and wasn’t theirs a heterosexual judgment of homosexuality as a ‘disintegration’! If he had told them of that attraction would it have been the right thing to counsel him in a worldly way, suggest that for him it was a matter of the ambience in that house, a fashion, the beguilement of male bonding in a period — his adulthood — and a place where social groupings were in transition. In that house, as the saying goes: no problem, black and white, brothers in bed together.

There could have been that.

But then Harald thought about it alone, at night, and came back to bed to find her awake. Perhaps if we had had a chance, if he could have come to us then — it would have been a mistake to see the Jespersen thing as an episode. Maybe that was the stability for him.

You mean the life in that house. That way.

Yes. Saving the girl: it was an attempt to make himself something he’s not. Someone like us. I don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself wanting to make love to a man. I don’t know whether I would have been wanting to run away from myself. Coming from our sort of background. Maybe he should have stayed with men. That was really for him. If not Jespersen, there would have been someone else and they might have had a better life together in the cottage than the sordid mess he committed himself to with a woman.

She got up out of their bed.

What’re you doing?

Over at the window, she drew back the curtains, it was a night shiny-black as wet coal and a plane making for the airport trailed its own constellation of landing lights up along the stars. The world was witnessing. D’you think that’s what he would have wanted from us?

Get back to bed.

They were closer, coming upon discoveries in one another’s being, than they had been since first they had met, when they were young and in the novelty of perilous human intimacy.

The Constitutional Court has gone into deliberation on the verdict and Harald and Claudia have no information as to how long this may take.

For them, their son has been already on trial — this trial in a court other than the one in which he will appear — and is awaiting a Last Judgment above any that may be within the jurisdiction to be handed down when his own case is heard. Motsamai is sympathetically condescending, reiterating reassurance. — I know you don’t believe me. Ah-hêh … I know what you think: what can I know if the whole question has been argued before the highest authority we have except the President of the country and God Himself, and those judges haven’t been able to come up with a verdict? But it may take them many weeks. My concern for my client does not include any fears about the outcome. What will emerge will be the end of the Death Penalty. My concern is to demonstrate without any doubt that this young man was driven by circumstances to act totally against his own nature. This woman, and the individual who was once more than his friend — the pair betrayed him out of his mind!—

There were other people in trouble waiting to be received by him. He ushered these two to the door of chambers. — Look, I want you to meet my wife, and my son — we’ve applied for medical school for him, I don’t know if he’s got the aptitude, you could give us some good advice, Claudia? What about this Friday evening? I hope you’ll get a good dinner. I’ll be coming back from the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein, so let’s say around eight-thirty, something like that.—

The aplomb glossed urbanely over the sensitivity to their situation; he knew how it was, they would be in retreat from the company of friends whose sympathetic faces served only to set them apart from the basis of old friendship, common circumstances no longer shared. It was not always necessary or desirable to keep the relationship with clients formal. Taking on a brief means establishing the confidence of human feeling, some sort of give-and-take, with the family of the life to be defended, even while retaining professional objectivity. This white couple didn’t have the resilience that blacks have acquired in all their generations of being people in trouble by the nature of their skins. He knows how to handle these two: they’ll feel they’re able to do something for him; that aside about wanting advice on a career for an ambitious son.

When they are in the visitors’ room neither lets surface their preoccupation with the unknown deliberations of the Constitutional Court. It was not the first time they had had to employ this tact; there are so many subjects and reactions that are inappropriate to display to someone living unimaginably, exposed there before you only for a half-hour between two prison warders. The prisoner is a stranger who should not be confronted with what can be dealt with only in the familiarity of freedom. Certainly Duncan knew of the subject of the first sitting of the Constitutional Court; he had access to newspapers but he — also out of tact, it’s a two-way process if it’s to make these visits possible — he does not speak of it either. Or perhaps it is because they could not even begin to comprehend what the proceedings of that Court must have meant to him as he followed reports. A man who declares himself guilty, is he declaring himself ready to die? Or does he, as only he can, know himself in the death cells with Makwanyane and Mchunu, asserting the right to life no matter what he has done?

They ask him instead if he’s able to make progress with the plans he’s drawing and he says yes he is, he is, the work is going well enough.

— It’s pretty remarkable you manage all that. — Harald is admiring; admiration is a form of encouragement that’s admissible.

— The only problem is I don’t get a chance to discuss any difficulty that comes up. With the others at the office, as we generally do. So this really will be all my own work … a bit eccentrically so, who knows.—

— Maybe someone from the firm could come and talk about it with you. Why not. — Harald is prepared to ask the senior partners for this service (if his junior colleague Verster had been the right person Duncan surely would have mentioned him); prison is not a disease, there’s nothing infectious to keep clear of, in this visitors’ room.

— Not worth the trouble. When I’ve finished the draft plan Motsamai will take it out and someone’ll look at it.—

What is really being said here is that he understands that if the Last Judgment is going to be in his favour and will ensure that his life will not end now, it still has to be endured: back to the drawing board. But what that means to him, having once sacrificed the life of order for chaos, is something that cannot be conveyed.

When they retreat down the corridors behind the riding buttocks of the usual warder, Claudia — and maybe Harald — envies a woman taking the same route who humbly tries to hide her face in a scarf as she brays aloud, like a beast of burden, in tears.

Claudia supposed they couldn’t very well refuse. They preferred to be at home together, these days. Best off like that. Recently Harald had taken tickets for a chamber music concert, his favourite César Franck on the programme, but the paths music takes are so vital, unlike the perceptions that divert in a film or a play — it drove them even deeper into their isolation.

He means well. Harald was familiar with the combination of business interests and a certain trace of personal liking come about, of course, that prompted such invitations.

Harald and Claudia had never been to a black man’s home before. This kind of gesture on both sides — the black man asking, the white man accepting — was that of the Left-wing circles to which they had not belonged during the old regime, and of the circles of hastily-formed new liberals of whose conversion they were sceptical. If they themselves in the past had not had the courage to act against the daily horrors of the time as the Left Wing did beyond dinner parties, risking their professions and lives, at least neither he nor she sought to disguise this lack (of guts: Harald faced it for himself, as he now did other soft moral options taken) by dining and wining it away. Black fellow members on the Board; well, they were no longer content to be names listed on letterheads; they were raising issues and influencing decisions; recognizing this — that at least had some meaning? And Claudia — she had something remote from anything he had, familiarity with the feel and touch of blacks’ flesh, knowing it to be like her own, always had known — an accusation, too, for all she failed to do further, in the past, but a qualification for the present; she didn’t need any gesture of passing the salt across a dinner table.

The address Motsamai’s secretary handed on his card was in a suburb that had been built in the Thirties and Forties by white businessmen of the second generation of money. Their fathers had immigrated in the years when gold-mining was growing from the panning by adventurers to an industry making profit for shareholders and creating a city of consumers; they were pedlars and shopkeepers who became processors of maize the millions of blacks who had lost the land they grew their food on couldn’t subsist without, manufacturers of building materials, clothing, furniture, importers of cigars, radios, jewellery, carpets. Their educated sons had the means of their fathers’ success to indulge in the erection of houses they believed to express the distinction of old money; dwellings like the ones the fathers might have looked on from their cottages and izbas in another country: the counts’ mansions, the squires’ manors. Architects they employed interpreted these ideas in accordance with their own conception of prestige and substance, the plantation-house pillars of the Deep South and the solid flounced balconies from which in Italy fascists of the period were making speeches. In the gardens, standard equipment, were swimming pools and tennis courts.

Some of the fortunes had declined so that portions of the grounds had been sold, some of the sons had emigrated again, to Canada or Australia this time. Some grandsons had reacted against materialism, as third generations can afford to, and left the suburb to live and work in accordance with a social conscience. There was a hiatus during which the houses were inappropriate to the taste of the time; they were regarded as relics of the nouveau riche, while newer money favoured country estates with stables, outside the city: the houses would be demolished and the suburb become the site of multinational company complexes.

But it looked as if it might be saved by the unpredicted solution of desegregation. A new generation of still newer money arrived, and these were no immigrants from another country. They were those who had always belonged, but only looked on the pillars and balconies from the hovels and township yards they were confined to. It was one of these houses that Motsamai had bought. Whether or not he admired the architecture (the parents did not have their son’s criteria for determining the worth or otherwise of people’s taste) it provided a comfortable space for a successful man and his family and was now supplied with current standard equipment, electrically-controlled gates for their security against those who remained in township yards and city squatter camps.

The enthusiastic chatter of the television set was part of the company, its changing levels of brightness another face among them. They were gathered in one area by a natural response to the oversize of the living-room where islands of armchairs and spindly tables were grouped. Hamilton Motsamai had discarded his jacket as he shed the persona of his day spent flying back and forth to plead in the Appeal Court at Bloemfontein. — Make yourself at home, Harald!—

A domestic bar that must have been part of the original equipment of the house was stocked with the best brands, a young man who seemed slight in contrast with the confident ebullience of his father was chivvied to offer drinks between Motsamai’s introductions to various others summoned — a brother-in-law, someone’s sister, someone else’s friend; unclear whether these were all guests or more or less living in the house. Motsamai switched angrily to his mother tongue to reproach several youngsters who were lying stomach-down on the carpet, paddling their legs in glee at the pop group performing on television, and had not risen to greet the guests.

The wife and a daughter — so many introductions at once — had entered with bowls of potato crisps and peanuts. Motsamai’s wife was a beauty in the outmoded style, broad-bosomed, her hair straightened and re-curled in European matronly fashion, but the daughter was tall and slender, nature’s old dutiful emphasis on the source of nourishment, the breasts, mutated into insignificance under loose clothing, her long dreadlocks drawn away from a Nefertiti profile, the worldly-wise eyes of her father emerging in slanting assertion under painted lids, and the delicate jut of her jaw a rejection of everything that would have determined her life in the past.

Motsamai’s wife — Lenali, that’s right — was animatedly embarrassed by the behaviour of the children.

— Never mind, they’re enjoying themselves, let’s not interrupt them. — Hadn’t she, Claudia — oh long ago — had the same parental reaction when her own son had ignored the boring conventions of the adult world.

— These kids are terrible. You can believe me. I don’t know what they learn at school. No respect. If you’ve had a boy, of course you know how it is, the mother can’t do anything with them and the father — well, he’s got important things on his mind, isn’t it … always! Hamilton only complains to me! I don’t know if you found it like that!—

This woman doesn’t know what happened to the boy Claudia ‘found like that’; or rather, if she does (surely Hamilton has told her something of the story of the clients he’s brought home) she doesn’t draw attention to their plight by the pretence that their son doesn’t exist, that what he says he has done has nullified everything he once was, the way old friends feel they must do. Duncan is not taboo, tonight, here. — I used to think it was because ours is an only child, and he was too much among grownups, he showed this the only way he could, just ignoring them. Wouldn’t kiss the aunts who patted his head and asked what he wanted to be when he was big … he’d disappear to his room.—

— Oh I find the teenage is the worst! In our culture, I mean, you don’t kiss your auntie, but you must greet her in the proper way we’ve always done.—

Harald, under his conversation with others heard; Claudia was laughing, talking about Duncan.

— You’re in the legal game, with Hamilton? — The brother-in-law, or was it some other relative.

— No, no, insurance.—

— That’s also a good game to be in. You pay, pay all your life and if you live a long time before you die the insurance people have had more of your money than they’re going to give out, isn’t it.—

There was head-thrown-back laughter.

— That’s the law of diminishing returns.—

The different levels of education and sophistication at ease in the gathering were something that didn’t exist in the social life Harald had known; there, if you had a brother-in-law who was a meat packer at a wholesale butchery (the first man had announced his métier) you would not invite him on the same occasion when you expected compatibility with a client from the corporate business world, and an academic introduced as Professor Seakhoa who would drily produce an axiom in ironic correction of naïve humour. Hamilton put a hand on either shoulder, Harald’s and the meat packer’s. — Beki, my friend here doesn’t come knocking on your door selling funeral policies, he’s a director who sits away up on the fifteenth floor of one of those corporate headquarters where bonds for millions are being negotiated for industries and housing down there below — the big development stuff.—

— Well, that must be an even better game, nê. More bucks. Because the government’s got to pay up.—

New faces appeared with the movement in and out, about the room. Some young friends of the adolescents, their voices in the higher register. The academic, whose belly wobbled in appreciation of his own wit, turned to tease them. Claudia — where was Claudia — Harald kept antennae out for her — she was talking to the son, no doubt about the prospects of a career in medicine, he had been captured by his father and delivered to her. A glimpse of her face as she was distracted for a moment to the offer of samoosas: Claudia’s expression with her generous frown of energy; probably about to suggest that the boy come to her clinic, put on a white coat, lend a hand where it could be useful and try out for himself what the practice of medicine should mean in service to the people and the country. She laughed again, apparently in encouragement of something the boy was saying.

A tiny, light-coloured old man had already scented substantial food and sat with a heaped plate on his knees eating a chicken leg warily as a cat that has stolen from the table. Everyone sauntered, talking, colliding amiably, to another room almost as large as the one they had left, where meat, chicken and potatoes, putu and salads, bowls of dessert decorated with swirling scripts of whipped cream were set out. Harald found his way to her. — We didn’t expect a party. — But she only smiled as if she were still talking to another guest. — Oh I don’t think it’s really that. Just the way the family gets together for the weekend.—

He had the curious feeling she wanted to move away from him, away among others choosing their food, among them, these strangers not only of this night, but of all her life outside the encounters in her profession, the dissection of their being into body parts. Here, among closely mingled lives that had no connection with hers and his — even the connection that Hamilton had in his chambers was closed off by an entry to his privacy — if she lost herself among these others she escaped from what held the two of them bound more tightly than love, than marriage, a bag tied over their heads, unable to breathe any air but that of something terrible that had happened on another Friday night. There was the hiss of beer cans being opened all around but Hamilton, who had filled his clients’ gin-and-tonic glasses several times, brought out wine. His own glass in hand, he went about offering one bottle after another; Harald didn’t refuse, as he customarily would, to mix drinks — anything that would maintain the level of equanimity attained would do. A man holding his plate of food carefully balanced before him came dancing up with intricate footwork as if with a gift; not of food, but with an unspoken invitation to partake — of the evening, the company, the short-term consolations. A man who had overheard that Harald was in the business of financing loans was taking the opportunity to corner him for advice, with heckling interruptions from others.

— It’s no win, man, without the collateral you can’t get the kind of money you’re dreaming about. Ask him. Ask him. Am I right? If you want to build a little house for yourself somewhere, that’s a different thing, then go to one of the government agencies, housing whatyoucallit, you get your little cents for bricks and windows—

— A casino! And where’ll you find a licence for that—

— Oh licence is nothing. Don’t you know the new laws coming in about gambling? He’ll get that. But if he finds the property, the piece of land and maybe there’s something on it he wants to convert, or maybe it’s empty — then the trouble begins. Oh just wait, man. Objections. Objections from the people in the neighbourhood, applications to the city council — you don’t know what hit you, it can drag on for months. And still you won’t win. I know, I know. Freedom. Freedom to object, object.—

— That’s how whites see it. Live anywhere you like but not next door to me.—

— Let him answer Matsepa—

— We don’t have capital. What is this ‘collateral’ but capital? For generations we’ve never had a chance to create capital, tonight’s Friday, every Friday people have had their pay packet and that’s what they ate until the next pay day. Finish. No bucks. Collateral is property, a good position, not just a job. We couldn’t have it — not our grandfathers, not our fathers, and now we’re supposed to have this collateral after two years of our government. Two years!—

— But let Matsepa ask, man!—

— The people your company gives money to for projects, where is their collateral? Where do they get it?—

— Look — the route to take is by consortium. That’s how it is done. We are talking of sizeable projects which require development funds; yes. — Harald hears his Board Room vocabulary in his own voice coming on as at the accidental touch of some remote control: who is that holding forth? — It’s a matter of the individual who has the vision, the idea … project … finding others who will come in … most have studied … the project requires … criteria laid down … our co-operation with the National Development Council … viable economically … benefit to the population … employment … production of commodity … The man may have the brains — and the empty pockets; he has to link up with people whose position in some trustworthy way … — He was being heard by a young man, a son, lying in a cell looking up at a barred window.

— So I must look for another Dr Motlana or Don Ncube?—

— Man, they’ve got all the ideas already, they don’t need you, Matsepa.—

— I’m coming to see you, anyway, Mr … Lindgard, that right? I’ll contact your secretary, she can call me when you’ve got free time. I move around a lot but at least I’ve got a cell phone, there’s my collateral.—

Hamilton came by. — Gentlemen, no free consultations. We’re here to relax. My people, Harald … I can’t get out of my car in town without someone blocking my way and wanting to know what they must do about some shop that’s repossessed their furniture or their wife who’s run away with their savings.—

Harald’s neighbour turned to his ear against the volume of laughter and music. — But you don’t know how he takes everyone’s troubles, doesn’t forget them. I’m telling you the truth. Although he’s a big man today. Helps many who don’t pay him. We were kids together in Alex.—

The professor was holding the beauty, Motsamai’s daughter, by the elbow. — Did you meet this niece of mine, Motshiditsi?—

She laughed as with long-suffering indulgence. — Ntate, who can pronounce that mouthful. I’m Tshidi, that’s enough. But Mr Lindgard and I have already met.—

— She’s my protégée. I saw her potential when she was this high and asking questions we dignified savants in the family couldn’t answer.—

He says what’s expected of him. — And she’s fulfilled what you saw.—

— Well, let me tell you she started off shrewdly by being bom at the right time, growing up at the right time. That’s the aleatory factor that counts most for us! Her father and I belong to the generation that was educated at missionary school, St. Peter’s, no less … Fort Hare. So we were equipped ahead of our time to take our place eventually in the new South Africa that needs us. Then came the generation subjected to that system euphemistically called education, ‘Bantu education’. They were equipped to be messengers, cleaners and nannies. Her generation came next — some of them could have admission to private schools, to universities, study overseas; they completed a real education equipped just in time to take up planning, administering our country. That’s the story. She’s going to outshine even her father.—

— You’re a lawyer, too.—

— I’m an agricultural economist at the Land Bank.—

— Oh that’s interesting … there are things that are unclear to me, in the process of providing loans for housing — although our field is urban, of course, the same kind of problems in principle must come up in the transformation I understand is taking place at the Bank.—

This young woman is too confident to feel a need to make him acknowledge any further her competence to answer, he’s passed the test, he’s placed himself on the receiving end of their exchange.

— In principle, yes. But the agricultural sector was not only integrated broadly into the financial establishment, through apartheid marketing structures, the Maize Board and so on — in fact in many ways it could afford to be independent of it — the Land Bank was there for them, essentially a politically-based resource for the underwriting of white farmers. The government, through the Bank, provided loans which were never expected to be paid back. The agricultural community, by definition white, because blacks were not allowed to own land, they weren’t even statistics in the deal — the white farmers were expected to make good only in terms of political loyalty coming from an important constituency.—

— And now this is changing.—

— Changing!—

— How d’you see it’s going to happen?—

He has only half her attention for a moment — she has caught the eye of, and makes a discreet signal with a red-nailed hand graceful as a wing to, someone across the room.

— By making it happen. New criteria for raising loans. Small grants to broaden the base of the sector, instead of huge grants to the few: all those who didn’t really have to worry whether their crops grew or not. You could always be bailed out by the Land Bank.—

— No more automatic compensation if the crop fails?—

— Fails? That means there’s been poor farming.—

— Natural disaster? Floods, drought?—

— Ah, failure may be compensated for; it won’t be rewarded. — She laughs with him at her own brusqueness.

— Excuse me — someone’s calling for me. We must talk about these things again, Mr Lindgard. The housing aspect, from you … — She has her father’s beguiling flash of warmth; the dop of brandy.

Motsamai’s children — at last, they too have professions; economists, prospective doctors, and lawyers and architects, God knows, there are other children of his in the room. Their grandfathers and fathers having survived so much, does this mean they’re safe; these will not bring down upon themselves something terrible.

Where was Claudia?

Claudia was dancing. Someone had replaced the children’s rock and rap with music of the Sixties, changing the rhythm of the room, and he followed the familiar, forgotten twists and pauses of her body, the skilful angles of her feet in response to her partner’s as if the arms and thighs and feet of the man were his own. Where is the past. Obliterated by the present; able to obliterate the present. What brought Claudia out among the dancers, was it a heavy, downcast woman who had been sitting alone, who now danced by herself in self-possession, stomping out on swollen legs the burdens within her? Or was it the music that was the metronome beat of student days when she boasted to her friends with excitement and bravado that she was pregnant, his happy wild love-making with her had evaded the precautions of the know-all young doctor-to-be. Or was it Hamilton’s libations. Or all these at once. Claudia had been found by a man who came from a different experience in every other way but this one: the music, its expression in body and feet, of the Sixties, it didn’t matter where he had performed its rituals in shebeens and yards, and she had carried them out in student union halls, they assumed the form of an assertion of life that was hidden in each. The impromptu straggle of dancers wove about in relation to one another with the unconscious volition of atoms; she disappeared and reappeared with her man — or was this a new partner — and passing near, lifted a hand in a small flutter of greeting. When they drove home she did not say, Why didn’t you dance with me, although he was asking it himself. He had had only to go over and take her hand, his body, too, knew that music which did not, like César Franck, reach into the wrong places. Remarks surfaced here and there, between them — Hamilton’s family connections: who was what? — impressions of the house, whom might it have belonged to originally; giggles at what the first owners would think of how it was inherited outside their dynasty now; at home, they shed clothes and were asleep in mid-sentence.

In the morning Claudia stood, dressed, in the doorway. You know I was drunk last night.

I knew. God bless Hamilton.

It wasn’t a manner of speaking; coming from Harald.

When the girl failed to arrive on the appointed day on two occasions, Senior Counsel Motsamai took over the telephone call made by his secretary for the third one and made clear to Ms Natalie James that she was expected without fail. This time she came, and sat herself down on one of the chairs facing the broad and deep moat of desk without waiting for the formality of his inviting her to do so. She was in charge: he read. For his taste, he did not regard her as beautiful, but he could feel how her manner of confrontation, distancing and beckoning at the same time — those yellow-streaked dark eyes with the pin-point gaze of creatures of prey which fix on you steadily without deigning to see you — was a strong attraction: male reaction to which was, Here I am.

Here he was; but he was in charge, in the chambers of the law. He had his notes before him. He went over with her once more the events of the Thursday evening in January. She had the ability, unusual in his experience of witnesses, of repeating exactly, word for word, the replies she had given before. There were no interstices to be taken advantage of in the text of testimony she had edited for herself. She and Duncan had not quarrelled — not that day, though they often did.

— So there was no particular provocation that perhaps led to your behaviour that night?—

She paused, slight movements of her head and twitch of lips in puzzled innocence. Her reactions, calculated or not, were inexplicably contradicted by her words, as if someone else spoke out of her. — I don’t do what I do because someone provokes me.—

It was while they were continuing in this way, the rally of his questions and her answers that he was enduring with the undeflected patience of professionalism, sure of her faltering to his advantage in the end, that she simply let drop the subject of the exchange, and made a remark as if reminded of something that might not be of interest to him.

— By the way, I’m pregnant.—

If she expected some sudden reaction she should have known better. Counsel conceals all irritation and anger in court — a discipline that serves to control the reception of any unforeseen statement. The art is to be quick in deciding how to use it. He nudged his back against the support of his chair. Ah-hêh. And simply asked another question.

— Is the child Duncan’s?—

She smiled at the accusation behind the question.

— It doesn’t matter.—

— Natalie … why doesn’t it matter? — He tries the fatherly approach.

— Because then they won’t be able to make any claim. It could be from that night, couldn’t it. They won’t claim.—

— What d’you mean, they won’t claim?—

— They’d want something of him. If something terrible happens to him.—

— The Death Penalty is going to be abolished, my dear. Duncan will go to prison and he will come out. Surely, for yourself, it must matter whose child it is you’re going to have. You must know, don’t you? You do know.—

— We made love — Duncan — that morning before we went to work, it was all in the same twenty-four hours. So who can say. It doesn’t matter.—

— No? You don’t care?—

Oh she is in charge, she is in charge. — I do care; it’s going to be my child, that’s who it is, mine.—

It was Counsel’s task — everything was his task, no wonder his wife complained that he had little attention to give at home in the fine house he had provided — his task to tell his client and the parents what might or might not be a new element in their life as people in trouble.

On their next half-hour in the visitors’ room Harald referred to it as a fact, without mention of any circumstances the girl related. — Hamilton has told us Natalie James is expecting a baby.—

Duncan faced them kindly, as if looking back at something from afar. — That’s good for her.—

Do you love her.

I suppose so.

And now.

Change the subject.

Claudia is talking to him of other things, she’s telling him what a nice boy Sechaba Motsamai is to have around helping at the clinic on Wednesdays, Claudia is able to feel herself close to her son, these last days before the trial, she looks forward to the visitors’ room, now, they’ve found the communication is there, all along, in just seeing each other between the barriers of the unspeakable.

Harald hears their voices and does not follow.

I suppose so.

He and Claudia will never know what it was that happened. What happened to their son.

Claudia wanted to go to the visitors’ room the day before the trial began. During the morning Harald abruptly left his office, passed his secretary’s careful absorption at her computer (she knows, she knows, there’s something that emanates from people when they are about the business of their trouble); down in the lift where employees whose names they’re aware he does not recall greet the executive member of the Board as a sign of loyalty to the firm that feeds them; is saluted in the building’s basement carpark by the security guard in paramilitary uniform, and arrives unannounced at chambers. Hamilton Motsamai is in conference with another client but when his secretary — she knows, she knows the trial starts tomorrow — informs him on the intercom he excuses himself to the client and comes to Harald. Nobody’s need is greater than Harald’s; Motsamai’s hand is outstretched, his mouth still is parted with the words he was speaking when he left his office, the switch of attention from one set of people in trouble to another is in his face as a slide projector flicks one transparency away for another to drop into view. Motsamai’s face has been formed by this succession; whatever his clients pay him for, however high his fees, they leave, like initials scratched into the living bark of a tree, their anguish on the surface of his facial expression; his strength, confidence and pride wear it as a palimpsest upon him. He and Harald go into an anteroom full of files and boxes. Motsamai’s tongue moves back and forth along the teeth of his lower jaw, bulging under the membrane of the lip, his wisp of beard lifts, as he listens to Harald: no, no. — Much better if you stay away. I’ll see him, I’ll be with him this afternoon. He’s prepared himself, nothing should be allowed to disturb that. His mother, no — you know, that can only get him thinking how he’s got to face you from the dock again tomorrow. He’ll be all right. He’s fine, he’s in control.—

Harald sits in his car. The key is in the ignition. A beggar sprawled against a shopfront is clawing bread from a half-loaf and stuffing it into his mouth. Mama traders call and argue among pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Rotting cabbage leaves adrift in the gutter; life pullulating in one way or another. People cross the windscreen as darkness overtaking light. Is Duncan afraid, the day before the trial?

Duncan is not afraid. Nothing could be more terrifying than that Friday night.

There is a face at the window. It’s the familiar face, the city’s face of a street boy: Harald has forgotten to give him his handout for having whistled and gestured the availability of this parkingbay when he arrived. He lowers the window. The boy has his gluesniffer’s plastic bottle half-stuffed under the neck of the garment he’s wearing, his black skin is yellowed, like a sick plant. What’s left of his intelligence darts quickly at the coin, his survival is to see at a glance if it is enough.

The exaltation of putting a face to everything denied me.

By both of them joined like rutting dogs on the sofa. The exaltation — so that is what violence is, street violence. I know it, I am of it, now. How it comes to you because there is nothing else.

It comes back to me through the hours with the two psychiatrists with their carefully arranged patient faces — how difficult for us humans to concoct an expression empty of judgment: that’s idiocy, or arrogance, superhuman — but they couldn’t get it out of me. Comprehend. Not Motsamai, either. And the court will not. No-one.

That face. His face. Bra.

Only she knows why I could do it. It was something made possible in me by her.

The courtroom is a present so intense it is eternity; all that has passed since that Friday night is made one in it, there is nothing conceivable after it.

There are many to bear witness. Not in the empty stand in the well of the court; all around Harald and Claudia. A murder trial, out of the common criminal class, with a privileged son in the professions accused of murder has provided the Sunday papers with a story of a ‘love triangle’ calling up not only readers’ concupiscence but also some shallow-buried prejudices: the milieu is described as a ‘commune’, ‘a pad’ where blacks and whites, ‘gay and straight’, live together, and there have been photographs somehow got hold of — large ones of Natalie James and the reproduction of an itinerant photographer’s nightclub group in which Carl Jespersen appears with Khulu. All around: the curious, who may or may not be able to identify the parents. Within the whispering, shuffle and creak, they are not obvious among strangers; as for themselves, theirs is a single identity they now have that years of marriage never achieved. There is only this court, this time, this existence, mother/father.

Not all in the visitors’ seats are voyeurs. There are Duncan’s friends. Some unexpected friends they did not know; what a secretive person he was — with them, his parents. A mother and daughter — women with a lot of hair who look like two versions of the same woman some years apart. Jewish probably. Duncan had Jewish and black friends Harald and Claudia did not have; he had moved on. The two women came up and gave their names. The younger version was saying, For me it’s as if it’s happening to my brother, but the elder’s voice elbowed hers out of the way, speaking in French, Nous sommes tous créatures mêlées d’amour et du mal. Tous.

Claudia thanked them for coming; there is a form for everything, it occurs to you unbidden.

What was that.

Claudia fingered distractedly back through school French. Something like us being creatures mixed of love and evil, all of us. I don’t quite see what she was getting at.

But Harald did.

Others approached, shook the parents’ hands, but none knew what to say as that foreign woman had, whoever she was: a messenger. And the other messenger was there. He stood distressed, forever guilty as the one who had brought, a curse he could not discard like a gun, on the way, the news that Friday evening that something terrible had happened.

Now what Hamilton had prepared them for was being enacted. Duncan was in the well of the court wearing a wide-striped shirt and red tie with grey pants and one of those outsize linen jackets young men choose these days — the nearest Motsamai will have been able to get him to wear a suit like Motsamai’s elegant own, Duncan probably didn’t own a suit. An appearance consistent with the moral world the judge and his chosen assessors occupy — the accused’s mother and father paid close attention to the outfit and what it implied about the gaunt man on his throne. An urbane judge — Hamilton had said in the hinting tone of satisfaction. Up there, the only distinguishing feature of the man in his crimson robe was round ears standing out alertly from his skull. Was the convention of dress Duncan presented something acceptable to a worldly judge who would not associate moral standards with a suit; did it matter what a man wore when whatever his clothes might say about him, he killed. The voice of a functionary — the judge’s clerk — confirms Duncan’s identity in this place, for this reason.

— Are you Duncan Peter Lindgard?—

— Yes.—

— You are charged with a crime of murder, in that you wrongfully and maliciously killed, on January 19th, 1996, Carl Jespersen. How do you plead?—

As on that Friday night in the townhouse when the messenger made his pronouncement, everything has come to a stop; held by Duncan’s profile, his presence. But the moment is broken into by Hamilton Motsamai, Senior Counsel for the Defence. He has swiftly risen. — M’Lord, in view of the nature of the accused’s defence, would M’Lord allow me to enter a plea on my client’s behalf? The plea is not guilty. The nature of the defence, M’Lord, will become apparent during my cross examination of the Prosecution’s first witness, whom my Learned Friend for the State has identified to me.—

The judge has nodded assent.

All about was the movement of people shifting closer to make place for more to be seated, but by now everyone has realized which couple is the parents; no-one presses up against them in the row where they sit.

The girl materializes; the one. She was the one on the sofa with her pants down, who may be seen: the other is out of reach of anyone’s gaze, underground along with all the others who are knifed or strangled or shot in the violence that is the city’s, the way of death. Three more were killed in rivalry between minibus taxi owners at a rank round the corner this morning. But Duncan, when he was awaiting trial, had been wrong when he thought that what happened to him would be lost in random violence and of no public interest. It is the street killings that are of no interest, happening every day.

There she is. The one. There are women who have days when they are ugly and days when they are beautiful. It may have something to do with a number of things: digestion, stage of biological cycle, and the mood of the way they wish to present themselves. She has on her a beautiful day. Claudia was not surprised at the aspect presented; she knew, from her medical practice, how the neurotic personality likes an audience, any audience, even one that can picture her with her legs apart on the sofa. Harald saw her for the first time as Duncan must always have seen her, his definitive image, even on her ugly days; the lovely soft skin indented, the twist of a chisel on a statue, to the curl of the lip at either side of the mouth, the rosy-buffed high forehead under stringy wisps of fringe, the lazy, intense pupils of eyes within a disguise of childish turn-down at the outer corners where the thicket of lashes met, the clothes that hid and suggested her body, modest flowing skirt that slid hack and forth across the divide of her buttocks as she walked to the witness stand, cossack blouse whose gauzy amplitude fell from the Modigliani shoulders and touched upon the points of meagre breasts. She is not a beauty but she has beauty at her command. And to be looking at her is to see that the design of her face is one that can transform into something menacing. Ugly days. When she entered the well of the court it was difficult to make out whether she avoided finding Duncan; suddenly — Harald saw — from the stand she was looking straight at Duncan, perfectly still and concentrated; and would Duncan reply for her, as she drew it from him: Here I am. Would he! Harald could not see, could not see Duncan’s eyes and, wildly agitated, scarcely knew how to contain this — imagined — male empathy with his son.

He felt an animus towards the Prosecutor the moment the man rose. It was a physical sense along his skin. The Prosecutor had the lugubrious high-arched brows and the elliptical wide mouth of the comedian that also may become the glaring face of the samurai. Wearing the endearing version of his features, he led his evidence in chief.

— You lived, as lovers, with Duncan Lindgard?—

— Yes.—

— How long had this relationship existed?—

— About a year and a half.—

— Were you happy together?—

She smiled, bunched lips and made an odd gesture that was the only sign of nerves evident in her — passed bent fingers lightly down the skin of her throat, as if to claw at herself. — Hardly that. Well, occasionally. Between all the other times.—

— Why was the relationship you both had chosen not a happy one?—

— Choose. I didn’t choose.—

— How was that?—

— He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.—

— Could you explain to the court what that means?—

— I had drowned and would have been dead if he hadn’t done it.—

— You had got into difficulties while going for a swim?—

— I walked out into the sea.—

— It was your intention to drown.—

— That’s right.—

The assembly is thrilled by this grand laconic recklessness towards the precious possession of life itself. Harald and Claudia can feel that the people around them already have fallen in love with this girl, their faces turned on her are capitulating: Here I am.

— Weren’t you glad to be alive, after all?—

— He wanted me to be. That was nice.—

— So why were you not happy, grateful?—

— He wanted me to be glad his way, to forget why I had made my decision that time, everything I hadn’t been able to deal with, as if it had disappeared. Pumped out of my lungs with the seawater, basta, a new Natalie. According to plan. He’s an architect, that’s all he knows — making plans, a plan for somebody’s life according to his specifications. Not mine. He found careers I ought to have, even attitudes. Nothing was mine.—

— What was your reaction?—

— I wanted to get myself back from him.—

— He saved you and then he proceeded to undermine you, is that it? He undermined your return to confidence? Why did you continue to cohabit in the cottage with him?—

How is it she can be a vulnerable woman, soft-fleshed creature with those eyes whose shape has not changed with the rest of her, stayed with the innocence of childhood, and say the things she does — I thought — I was fascinated — if I could go on living like that with him — then that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I’d have tested it out, and if I could survive … well, a kind of dare. I’ve had so many failures.—

— So you were desperate. You had already attempted suicide and now once again you were desperate.—

— I suppose you’d call it that.—

— Did he understand your desperation?—

— Oh yes. That was why he was always trying to find his solution for me. What he’ll never understand, doesn’t want to understand is that I can’t use someone else’s solutions hanging like a chain round my neck. He could only strangle me.—

— In what some might see as his well-meaning, would you say he was possessive? Jealous?—

— Possessive … every thought I have, every trivial action, he pored over, took to pieces.—

— Jealous of other men — their interest in you?—

— He was jealous of the air I breathe.—

— What were your relations with the men at the house?—

— They were his friends and they became mine as well. Thank heaven for them, because they didn’t take life too seriously, they were not like him and me, we could all let our hair down and have fun together. He kept me away from friends I might make for myself. They were always the wrong people for me—he decided. It wasn’t worth quarrelling about, in the end.—

— You knew he had a homosexual affair with one of the men in the house?—

— Oh yes, he told me everything about himself. Rut everyone had forgotten about it.—

— On the night of January 18th, did you have sexual intercourse with one of the men? Carl Jespersen?—

— Yes. It happened.—

— How did it come about?—

— Carl was someone you could talk to about anything. And he knew what Duncan was like. I used to go to him when Duncan and I had quarrelled and he had a way of, well, putting things in perspective. It’s not the end of the world.—

— Did you have an intimate relationship with Carl Jespersen previous to that night?—

— Good God, no. He was gay; he and David were together. He found this job for me where he worked, and that was a solution Duncan approved for me. Duncan was reassured that Carl would keep an eye on me so that I wouldn’t have anything to do with other men there. Duncan was always afraid that I’d leave. It had happened to him before; he closes his hand so tightly on what he wants that he kills it.—

The Prosecutor paused to let her mere figure of speech find its resonance in the charge before the court: murder.

— So the accused had no reason to be jealous of Carl Jespersen?—

— No reason. But that’s to say — he is jealous of everything, he broods on everything connected with me, even when he himself has chosen the solution. Carl and I got along well together, we worked together every day, he could have cooked up something in his mind even over the fact that Carl was the one who smoothed things between him — Duncan — and me. Reconciled us to each other. I mean, to what Duncan is, what Duncan was doing to me.—

— Why did your relationship as a friend with Carl Jespersen change, that night?—

— A party developed at the house and I was enjoying myself. But Duncan again wouldn’t have it, he was sure I wouldn’t get up in time for work next morning. I didn’t know whether I really was in my place in an advertising agency but Duncan was always worried that I wouldn’t take it seriously. He wanted me to go back to the cottage with him. In front of other people he was pleading and arguing — humiliating me. I’d had enough that day.—

— What had occurred that distressed you?—

— We’d talked half the night before, started again, quarrelled when we woke up in the morning, it ended the usual way. I’d had enough.—

— Was that the reason why you did not go back to the cottage with the accused when the party ended?—

— Yes.—

— You were afraid that the hostility of the accused would subject you to another night of abuse.—

— I stayed on to help Carl clean up and to get the whole scene off my chest, talking to him about it. I couldn’t bear to go back to the cottage and be reproached all over again, for my own good. I should have taken my car and driven off, right then — anywhere — as I’ve done many other times.—

— Was violence part of the accused’s reproaches to you, did he strike you?—

— No. It didn’t come to that.—

— But he threatened you?—

— Often I knew it. Not in what he said. But in the way he was; the way he looked. He was wanting to kill me. Sometimes it came out of him like a light.—

— You were sure he had the capacity of violence. You were afraid?—

— I knew he couldn’t kill me, because I was the one he had taken out of the water.—

— But you had to take refuge from him that night?—

— I just needed something without chains. Carl made me laugh instead of crying and he comforted me. Then what we did was natural. Part of it. I have never had any comfort from Duncan. I don’t know what he brought me back to life for.—

Again, why is Duncan not in the story?

He is the vortex from which, flung away, around, is the court. If he cannot understand why he did what he did, there will be the explanations of others. Versions. And there is this version of what he saw from the doorway; the first time, that is. She is on trial, not he. This is the way it was for her; natural. Part of it. A mating dance for three, first he with one and the other, then those two together. She was ‘enjoying herself’, the wildness he knew so well, that was her means of exploding the self that tormented her, that ended in the water, or with the pills she was able to charm out of doctors and pharmacists. When she said he took me to a hospital, she didn’t say how many times. Enjoying herself and he was the rescue service again, needing to take her back to the cottage and give her love, loving, no matter what she did (what other comfort is there). Not drunk, no. She doesn’t need alcohol to stimulate her, going on the attack with words is all the stimulant she needs, it can keep up her excitation through the nights. So this time she doesn’t want to be ‘saved’ as she puts it, in advance. It’s his turn to be victim.

If he could free himself (his companions the police are beside him) and walk across the well of the court to her, what is it that he would want to say?

How could you think of something so exquisitely (Motsamai’s adverb) appropriate to destroy me? The two of you; both so clever, knowing me so well.

You’ve told it to them your way: you didn’t tell them that it was in you, it was in your head, it was you who put it in me, so that was what you saw in me: you said to me more than once at three, four in the morning — there were birds beginning to call in the garden where I dropped that thing — you said, one day you’ll want to kill me, that’s what you want more than anything, to kill me to get what you want, save me and yourself.

But she’s saved herself. She got into her car and drove away from us, Carl and me. The dead and the accused. There she is up on that stand and we’ll never talk until we hear the birds, again.

— Ms James, are you pregnant?—

At once the judge stops Motsamai; but the flourish with which Motsamai has opened his cross examination has cut through the air.

— Mr Motsamai, what has this invasion of the witness’s privacy to do with the case — I order it withdrawn.—

— With respect, M’Lord, it is most pertinent to the relationship of the witness with the accused, and the tragic consequences of that relationship. May I have your permission to proceed?—

— Your claim to pertinence better be good, Mr Motsamai, and promptly evidenced.—

The two understand one another; both know the judge had to make the objection, both knew he would rescind it. Senior Counsel doesn’t ask questions merely to create a sensation, although the immediate effect of this one, on the temperature of the public, is just that. There are stirrings and stifled exclamations. Shame. Not shame for her antics on the sofa, which they relish the opportunity to review, but shame, poor good-looker, for having what happens to women brought out before them all by the nasty prying of a lawyer and — one of those old, officially outlawed reactions comes back — a white girl, spoken to like this by this black man with his lined face drawn tight and demanding by the years when his kind couldn’t have asked any question at all of her, a white.

In the moment the question was put to her, to the whole court, the public, her amazement swiftly had become a reluctant, ironic recognition of this wily enemy: she should never have told him, in passing, so to speak, to dramatize herself in his chambers!

Motsamai repeats the question softly; she’s heard it once.

— Yes.—

Watching her, Harald understood that the girl had not given the Prosecutor this information when he was preparing her as State witness. And Hamilton — he must have made a shrewd guess that this would be so; the Prosecutor’s moral climate, to be met by her, was one in which she knew he would want to think the best of her.

— Is Duncan Lindgard the father of the child you expect?—

She answered, no need to whisper. — I can’t say.—

— Could it be the child of Carl Jespersen?—

— Possibly.—

— You took no precautions against such an eventuality, in your impulsiveness that night after the party?—

— That’s so.—

— Is that why you can’t say whether the child is Duncan Lindgard’s, the man with whom you were cohabiting, or Carl Jespersen’s, the man with whom you were intimate that night?—

— Yes.—

— Doesn’t the date of conception, of which you must be more or less aware from your doctor’s confirmation of your pregnancy, rule out one of the two men as father?—

— It doesn’t.—

— How is that?—

— You know. I told you when you asked me in your office. Duncan made love to me in the early morning, the same day, it was the way bad nights ended.—

— Are you not worried, does it trouble you that you don’t know who is the father of the child you’re going to give birth to?—

Natalie turns her head away, first this side then that, away from them all, she escapes the court borne by the will of the public: shame. Then she comes back to answer them all. — It’s my child.—

Duncan wants to thrust the policemen against the walls and rush to hold her poor head, face, mouthing foul words at him, silenced against his chest, cradling her for the child she abandoned, Natalie/Nastasya, the death she submerged herself for and lost — but Motsamai can’t be restrained, the process can’t be halted. Ever since he, Duncan, stood in the doorway something was started that can’t be stopped.

— Doesn’t it disturb you to think of the distress this news will cause the accused, who has given you his faithful love and support, and which you have accepted from him, despite all your accusations against him, for several years?—

— Nobody’s business but mine.—

— Is that your answer to the question of whatever effect, however painful, your news will have on him?—

It is as if, for her, Motsamai and his pursuit of her don’t exist. She repeats — Nobody’s business but mine.—

— You don’t care. Very well. Ms James, I believe you are something of a writer, poems and so on, you’re familiar with many expressions. Do you know the meaning of in flagrante delicto? —

— I don’t need any explanation.—

— You don’t need any explanation. Were you found in flagrante delicto with Carl Jespersen on the sofa in the living-room where the party was held, the lights on and the doors open, anyone could have walked in, on the night of Thursday 18th of January? Was it the accused, the man who saved your life and with whom you had been cohabiting as lovers, who walked in and found you there?—

— Yes. — And the monosyllable spreads through the keen receptivity of the public: yes yes yes.

— You admit that you performed, before his eyes, the sexual act with his intimate friend. Have you not thought of the renewed anguish this latest news is going to bring him in addition to the shock and pain you caused him when he was confronted with the sight of you and Jespersen that night? You admit to intercourse with both men within the period of twenty-four hours. The child is yours. What does this mean? There is no child without a father. Are you proclaiming a miracle, Ms James? Your immaculate conception? —

Objection from the Prosecutor, upheld, Motsamai withdraws the question and proceeds with a wave of the hand.

— You have two putative fathers for your child. It doesn’t matter to you. M’Lord, I put it to the court: this callous, careless, yes, uncaring attitude is surely abhorrent to any responsible person who has due concern for the feelings of another. How is the accused supposed to accept that the woman he loves doesn’t care whether the child she is going to bear is or is not his? Isn’t this cynical coda the final, cruel afterword to the dance she led him, which evidence we shall place before this court describes as a life of hell. Finally, there was the extreme, the unendurable provocation she subjected him to on the night of January 18th, so that the attitude of her partner to that exhibition of the sexual act, when next day the accused found the man at ease on the same sofa on which it was committed, culminated in the accused as a blankout in which he committed a tragic act. The witness’s share in responsibility for that tragedy has just been confirmed out of her own mouth. It has been confirmed once and for all by the sentiments she has now openly expressed in total indifference to the abuse of the accused she commits yet again, this time taking no account of his feelings that she may be bearing his child.—

— Have you concluded, Mr Motsamai?—

Yes, like an opera singer breaking off on the top note, he knows the pitch at which to stop. The public is fickle, led by whoever has the gift to sway them, or they are such a community of voyeurs, now, that there are even factions which have developed among them. It’s the judge’s adjournment for tea, and as Harald and Claudia move out with them someone manoeuvres close and says, claiming hissing intimacy, She’s the one who ought to be up for it. Khulu has joined Harald and Claudia and he uses the tilt of his broad shoulders to make way for them in protection.

The State’s psychiatrist is a woman, while the Defence’s choice is a man. For some reason, Defence Counsel is pleased about this; Hamilton explains: a woman, even in the moral climate of an urbane judge, will be likely to be perceived as soft on the character of the woman in the case, vis-à-vis the issue of provocation, a male is likely to be accepted as more professionally objective. Claudia smiles behind a fist held at her mouth.

— That’s the fact of it, my dear doctor. — Hamilton gives a short briefing in the echoing corridors, just before the court sitting resumes. Voices, the dialogues of other people in trouble rebound hollow against the high ceilings but Harald and Claudia hear only their own exchanges with the man who has them in his hands. His confidence is like the dop of brandy he offers in chambers, a warmth that quickly fades from the blood.

The Prosecutor continues his case, calling the State psychiatrist and leading her evidence. She exudes competence from the freckled flesh of breasts tightly twinned like displaced plump thighs in the neckline of her dress as she testifies that the accused’s intellect is within high limits, his judgment sound.

— In your opinion, would such a level of intellect and sound judgment operate in conscious responsibility for actions, even in stressful situations?—

— Yes. The accused was not entirely unprepared for what he saw on that night after the party. I believe, from my consultations with him, that he was suspicious of the situation before he came upon the couple in the sexual act. He had made himself custodian of his partner’s morals, this was a constant source of quarrels and conflict between them. There is deep subconscious animosity present within his passionate possessiveness towards her. He would not face the reality of her personality, although she was frank with him, and he prides himself on being an advocate of personal freedom, including sexual freedom. He constantly suspected her of infidelity, whether on occasions when this was justified, or not. He had an obsessional, evangelical attachment to her which manifested itself in rational, precisely practical direction of every aspect of her life.—

— Was his day of inaction after the discovery of the couple consistent with this rationality?—

— In my opinion it was.—

— A day of inaction, contemplation, followed by action — is this also consistent with purposeful behaviour?—

— Yes. His is the personality of a brooder. He does not act on the spur of the moment. He plans. He planned the young woman’s whole life without her volition or consent.—

— Do you believe, then, that he could have shot Jespersen ‘on the spur of the moment’, almost twenty-four hours later than he had discovered the compromised couple?—

— No. If he were to have acted in an irrational state, unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behaviour, he would have attacked Jespersen at once, in the shock of his suspicions proved by what he came upon.—

— In what state of mind, then, would you say, with what intentions, would you say, he went to the house next day?—

— He went to the house with the conscious intentions of jealousy built up during his solitude.—

— In a rational state of mind?—

— Yes.—

— He went to the house intending to kill Jespersen?—

She would not be able to say to what extreme his intentions might carry him. But she was not convinced of the amnesia of the accused in respect of what happened at the house after Jespersen told him to pour himself a drink.

— The fact is that after forming those intentions in his hours in the cottage, he murdered Jespersen. Was he in full awareness of what he was doing?—

— He is an individual in whom self-control has been strongly established since childhood. It is an axiom of his middle-class background. He is not led by emotion to act on impulse, he’s deliberate in every course of action he takes, whatever that might turn out to be.—

The Prosecutor’s gesture was of complete satisfaction with his expert’s testimony: no more questions necessary.

Motsamai rose with arms away from the body, elbows and hands curved open before him as if to take up something offered him. — Doctor, what is a state of shock?—

— It’s a mental phenomenon that affects different people in different ways. Some people cry, some burst into anger, some run.—

— But in general — not the variety of reaction, but the effect on cognition, the sudden disorder of mental processes?—

— There is the effect of mental confusion. Yes. And as I have explained, it manifests itself in different ways.—

— Including the impulse to run away and hide?—

— Yes.—

— In your experience, Doctor, is a profound shock something that is quickly over, the individual concerned regains emotional balance, with the self-control this implies, just like that? Indeed, among your patients there surely have been some for whom a profound shock has had extremely long-term consequences — from what I have learnt, it haunts them to such an extent that in order to regain emotional balance they seek out your skills …—

Harald is alert to a stir of disapproval under the judge’s robe, but this passes without an objection to the jibe.

— Is it not feasible that when the accused fled in shock from the sexual exhibition of Ms James and Jespersen and hid himself in the cottage, he spent the hours there not in instant recovery to his rationality and capability of deliberate intentions, but in the state of mental confusion that you have identified as the effect of shock?—

— It is possible.—

— You would agree that his was profound shock?—

— Yes.—

— In the case of profound shock, would you say that it may increase, rather than decrease, mental and emotional confusion in the process you term brooding? (A tendency to which you have diagnosed in the accused.) Is it not true that the impact of what has caused the shock gathers force as all the implications of the painful situation mount in a growing mental and emotional confusion? Mind-blowing. So that the individual cannot, as we say, think straight; think at all.—

— Shock could have extended effects of mental confusion. Again, this depends on the personality of the individual. In my opinion, Mr Lindgard is one whose long experience of emotional stress has equipped him to regain mental equilibrium and rationality rapidly, in accordance with his nature.—

— So you confirm that the accused had had a long experience of emotional stress, with Natalie James.—

— Yes. He brought it upon himself.—

— Both you and your learned colleague, Dr Basil Reed, a psychiatrist with twenty-three years experience in your field, have had the opportunity to assess the personality and mental state of the accused during a period of twenty-eight days?—

— Yes.—

— How long have you been in practice as a psychiatrist, Dr Albrecht?—

— Seven years.—

— Your senior colleague’s, Dr Reed’s opinion, as set out in his report to the court, is that the accused’s long experience of emotional stress, to which you yourself attest, is of a nature that far from finding resolution in rational thought and intention, culminated in unbearable emotional stress in which the accused was precipitated into a state of dissociation from reason and reality. Is it true that such a state, as a result of prolonged stress compounded by profound shock, is a state recognized by your profession?—

— It is recognized. As one among other reactions to trauma.—

— It is recognized. — Motsamai’s palms come slowly, measuredly together. — No further questions, M’Lord.—

His gesture claims the State’s case is closed, although the Prosecutor has still to declare this. Harald and Claudia watch the Prosecutor intently and hear his words without interpreting meaning; where is their son, what happened to their son, in these statements that turn him about as some lay figure, he is this, no, he’s that? Motsamai will have the hermeneutics according with the legal moral climate; he’ll explain.

The Prosecutor wears his down-turned samurai mouth and his eyebrows are furled together; he does not require any other, particular vehemence and he has not Motsamai’s range; a prosecutor knows he’s not the star the constellation of the Bar needed, its black diamond. — The sum of evidence is that the accused is a highly intelligent man, in full possession of the faculties of conscience, who shot dead, in cold blood, a man lying defenceless on a sofa. The issue before the court is plain: it is that of capability. Criminal capability; did the accused or did he not have this. Whatever conflicting expert opinions may emerge, it is clear that he did not act when it would seem natural, even excusable, for him to do so. He did not tackle the deceased immediately, when he found the man taking his place, performing sexual intimacy with the individual he believed he owned, body and soul. If he had done so, it would not be necessary to seek expert opinion to know that that attack would have been made when he was out of his mind, so to speak, overcome by emotion. But no; he turned his back on the scene, went away to spend a whole day examining his feelings and the options open to satisfy them; his sexual defeat, his male pride, the pride of a totally domineering male (which we have heard testimony was his unfortunate nature). He could have thrown the girl out of the cottage, severed relations with her as his creation — he brought her back to life, remember — turned ingrate. He could have scorned to have anything further to do with her, Jespersen, and the house where such things could happen. These were options. But in full possession of his rightful senses, after plenty of time to consider his course of action, he went to the house, knowing Jespersen would be there at that time of the evening, and made use of the gun he knew was kept in the house, to kill Jespersen. These are the indisputable facts. The accused was criminally capable of the act of murder he performed and I submit, Your Lordship, that the court deal with him in cognizance of this, if justice is to be done to his victim and to the moral code of our society: Thou shalt not kill.—

For some reason that is not explained it is announced at what would have been the adjournment for lunch that the court will not sit in the afternoon; the case will continue at 9 a.m. tomorrow. The judge is not obliged to give account of what may be some urgent commitment elsewhere; or perhaps an aching tooth for which a visit to the dentist is his priority. People make the claims of these commonplace ills against matters of life and death. To hell with them. But a judge cannot be consigned in this way, by Harald, or anybody else.

The tension Hamilton Motsamai meets in their faces, concentrated on him, must surely irk him. No, he is impervious but not indifferent; he has his interpretation of the process so far, ready for them. It is all going as expected, he tells. There are no surprises. Nothing to worry about.

And tomorrow?

You can’t ask him about tomorrow. Tomorrow he will have Duncan on the witness stand. Not even to Harald and Claudia will he reveal his strategy, one can only try to infer some idea, from the angle of his approach with State witnesses today, how he will conduct his case tomorrow: Duncan in those hands.

They are right. All of them. It is so: he and she cannot distinguish which Duncan is being described in truth by the Prosecutor, the psychiatrist, by Motsamai. Perhaps he himself, back in his cell, knows. Perhaps they will know, tomorrow.

— Although Natalie James, with whom you were cohabiting, worked in the same advertising offices with Carl Jespersen, where he had obtained a position for her, and she was travelling to-and-fro to work with him, spending her lunch hours with him daily, you were not concerned that an attachment might be forming between them?—

At last, Duncan is about to speak. To speak for himself.

— No.—

— Why?—

Motsamai’s question is a cue in a dialogue everyone knows is of his devising, rehearsed. But Duncan’s replies are not lines learnt. Harald and Claudia hear his voice coming as if Duncan is talking to himself. To them; they are overhearing their son.

— Because Carl was not interested in women. Except as friends.—

— Why were you sure of this?—

— He was gay. A homosexual.—

— How did you know?—

Ah, but the banal question had a lawyerly purpose, Motsamai has the flair to build his scene carefully for his client.

— He lived as a homosexual. Everyone who shared the house was homosexual.—

— You lived on the same property. Did you share the same inclinations?—

— At one time I had a relationship — with a man.—

— One of the men in the house?—

— Yes—

— With whom?—

— With Carl.—

— With Carl Jespersen. So it was this experience that led you to believe that there could be nothing between Natalie James and Jespersen. Were you in love with Natalie James?—

As it touches on his nerve-ends, Harald and Claudia shrink from the question, with him.

— We were close.—

— It was a love relationship, a sexual relationship between a man and a woman?—

— Yes.—

— Ah-hêh. If you could have a homoerotic affair, and then fall in love with a woman, enjoy a heterosexual relationship, how could you be sure that Carl Jespersen would not have sexual designs on your lover, Natalie?—

It is difficult to trust Hamilton as he shows himself now. Harald sees Motsamai is enjoying himself, Duncan’s life is material for a professional performance. The man who brings from the Other Side the understanding of people in trouble, the man in whose hands there is the succouring glass of brandy, is left behind in chambers.

— Because he wasn’t attracted to women. Sexually. Anatomically, he told me often, he found them repulsive. I can’t go into — repeat — some of the things he liked to say. I can only put it — their genitals — he felt disgust for women.—

— Did he say these things to you in an attempt to dissuade you from heterosexual rotations?—

— I suppose so. At one time.—

— So you were absolutely confident that he could have no erotic intentions towards your woman lover?—

— Yes, quite sure.—

— Although you yourself had had homosexual relations with him, and then fell in love and entered into a close relationship with a woman, it did not occur to you that he might be capable of the same instincts?—

— No. It was out of the question. I am not homosexual, not any more than any adult human being has some erotic ambivalence that may or may not — come out — in certain circumstances. I had only that one attachment. He was actively homosexual, he’d been so, he often told me, from the age of twelve.—

— So you had absolutely no idea that he was having an affair — Natalie was having an affair with Jespersen?—

Across the well, in the rapt, prurient silence of the court, from the target that was the witness stand there came distinctly the sharp small sound of Duncan’s tongue pressed and released against his palate. The air of the spectators tingled; they had been waiting before a cage for the creature to cry out — There was no affair. —

— You are completely convinced of that?—

— I know. Carl was David’s lover, Carl was heavily involved with him.—

— Can you describe what happened on the night of the 18th January: there was a party at the house?—

— It was not really a party. The house is a place where people just turn up. And often Natalie and I would join the men at the house and we’d eat together at night. I suppose we were a sort of family. Better than a nuclear family, a lot of friendship and trust between us.—

— That night you had a meal together.—

— Some other friends of David and Khulu came in for drinks and then as it got late, stayed on to eat with us. So I suppose you could say it became a spontaneous kind of party. David had done quite a lot of drinking and he went to bed when the others had gone. Khulu left with one of them — some rendez-vous of his own. Natalie had been keeping the party going with her anecdotes about experiences as a cruise hostess, she’s a devastating mimic, and she hadn’t been much help in the kitchen so she offered to stay behind and clean up with Carl. She’ll make that sort of gesture. When she’s been particularly flamboyant. Just because she hates — never does domestic chores. I know it’s necessary for the sense she has of herself, so I left her to it and went to our cottage — to bed.—

The judge lifted his head as if he had at last found something that intrigued him. — Natalie James, in her testimony yesterday, gave a rather different version of the events. Was there not an argument between you, didn’t you try to make her return with you to the cottage?—

— You cannot persuade Natalie when she is in that sort of state.—

— Are you saying that there was no altercation with her before the others present?—

— She was in the mood. So if she wouldn’t come home and give herself some rest, it was better for me to leave.—

The judge’s glance gives Motsamai the signal to continue.

— What time was that?—

— About one o’clock.—

— You expected she would follow?—

— Naturally.—

— Did she?—

— No.—

Motsamai is patient against resistance; Harald, Claudia have the sense of Duncan fleeing, fleeing, out of the cell he has occupied, out of the closed institution for the mentally incapacitated, out of the court, out of the gallery of faces whose prey he is — out of himself.

Motsamai is in pursuit.

— What happened then?—

— I woke up. She wasn’t there. I saw it was half-past two. I was worried. About her crossing the garden so late in the dark, there are intruders all over the suburb.—

— And then?—

Now he tells it by rote; it is something he has been told happened to him. By another self; the lawyer becomes the accused’s other self once he has absorbed, appropriated the facts.

— I went out, through the garden, to the house. The lights were on and the verandah door was open. I went into the living-room and she was under him on the sofa. Carl.—

— They were making love?—

— They were finishing. They couldn’t stop. So I saw it.—

In the minds and memories of all, strangers, bodies side by side in the public gathering, there is the shared moment before the orgasm. They are a collective of the flesh. They know. Does the judge partake, does he recall, does he too know that moment, made love last night, so that he truly understands what it was that the accused could not help seeing, that couldn’t stop? Not even for the one standing in the doorway.

What did they do, those two discovered, and what did he do, Motsamai is asking. The answer is Duncan doesn’t know, he left what he saw as Natalie was suddenly aware of him and Carl’s face appeared for a moment with the rise and fall of the bodies, he turned back to the dark.

Duncan fled, flight was possible that time, as it is not now.

For Motsamai is developing that part of the progression which is easily comprehensible: what Natalie James did was drive away, she did not return to the cottage that night or next day. Duncan did not sleep during what was left of the night. He did not go to his work at the drawing board in the morning. It was Friday. Friday, January 19th.

— What did you do? You spent the day in the cottage?—

— Just thinking.—

— Were you thinking what you might do about the situation. —

— No. No. I was looking for an explanation. A reason. Trying to work out why.—

— Why such a thing could happen?—

— Yes. Whether what I saw.—

— Were you thinking of confronting Natalie? Of seeking out your friend Carl, to confront him?—

— I didn’t want to see them. I had seen them. I was looking for the explanation, in myself. That’s all I thought of, all day. I’m used to facing crises of one kind or another with her; I can depend on myself in dealing with them.—

— Have you done this successfully, that is to say with no ill consequences, before?—

— Many times.—

— So you had no thought of revenge of any kind, towards either of them?—

— Revenge for what. I don’t own either of them, they are free to do as they like.—

— You had no thought at all of any kind of revengeful accusation, let alone action for how their ‘doing as they like’ affected you? Your life? Your love relationship with Natalie?—

— No.—

— Your former relationship with Carl Jespersen?—

Surely what he said now was not in Motsamai’s rehearsed script.

— No. All I could remember — about seeing them there like that — was disgust, a disintegration of everything, disgust with myself, everyone.—

— Yes? — Motsamai’s is a conductor’s gesture from the podium.

— This was what I was trying to explain, so that I could put — things — together again, understand myself.—

— Were you thinking about the future of your relationship with Natalie? Did you think it could continue, after what you saw — her particular use of her freedom, her reward of your love and care for her?—

— How do I know. It had continued after so many occasions that could have put an end to it.—

— You stayed in the cottage all that day, lying on the bed? Alone?—

— Yes. With the dog.—

— When did you get up, what prompted you?—

— The dog, he was hungry, restless. I got dressed and gave him his dish of food.—

Motsamai drew a tide of deep breath, his black gown rose over his breast, he took time, for the two of them, Duncan and himself. — And then?—

— Outside. He eats outside. So I was in the garden.—

— What time was this?—

— I hadn’t looked at a watch, it must have been the time we usually fed him, about half-past six, or seven.—

— You were in the garden; did you return to the cottage?—

— No.—

— Why?—

— I just (the gesture fell back half-way; it was the first time he had used his hands, those attributes of defence given up along with admittance of guilt) I just walked over to the house.—

— What was your purpose?—

— I found myself in the garden. Instead of going hack into the cottage, I walked over.—

— Did you hope to see anyone at the house, talk to someone there? One of the other friends?—

— I didn’t want to talk to anyone.—

— Then you mean to tell the court, you had no reason to go there? — Which one of the carefully chosen assessors, one white, one sufficiently tinctured to pass as black, was it who was speaking — both sat, either side of the judge, silent henchmen. The voice was slow and clumsy. Harald had the strange sense that it came from a medium through whose mouth the public, the people filling the court, spoke.

— I found myself in the garden, I think then I had to find myself standing again where I stood in the doorway.—

Motsamai leaves no moment of silence before he takes up affirmation: —So you crossed the garden to the house to stand once again from where you saw the pair, your former male lover and the woman, your present lover, coupling on the sofa. And when you reached the same doorway, what then?—

Claudia could smell her own sweat, there is no cosmetic that can suppress anguish that only the body, primitive mute that it is, can express, hygiene is a polite convention that covers the animal powers in suburban life. Is Harald praying — is that the other kind of emanation, that comes from him; let them mingle, the brutish and the spiritual, if they can produce the solidarity promised long ago in covenant with their son.

Duncan is now speaking by rote again. As if there is something switched off, a power cut in some part of the brain.

Jespersen was lying on the sofa.—

— What was his reaction when he saw you?—

— Smiled.—

— He smiled. Did he speak?—

— Carl said, Oh dear. I’m sorry, Bra.—

The judge addresses his question as if it may be answered either by the accused or his counsel. — ‘Bra’, what does that signify, ‘bra’?—

— It’s a fraternal diminutive used between us black men, M’Lord, and also extended to white men with whom blacks share fraternal bonds now, in a united country. It means you claim the person thus addressed as your brother. — And Motsamai switched in perfect timing from judge to accused — So — he claimed you as still a brother.—

— He. did.—

— What was your response?—

— I thought then, it was him I had come to.—

— Did you confront him for an explanation of his behaviour, did you think a casual ‘I’m sorry’, the kind of apology a man makes when he bumps against someone in the street, was sufficient?—

— He talked. We are not children, didn’t we both of us have the same credo, we don’t own each other, we want to live freely, don’t we, whether it’s going to be sex or something like taking a long walk. Never mind, he said, the walk is over the sex is over, it was a nice time, that’s it, isn’t it. Hadn’t that always been understood between him and me. Just unfortunate, he said, he and Natalie had been a bit too impulsive, she’s usually a girl who arranges things more carefully, privately. He had his good-natured laugh. He told me, all of us know it — he said — I knew it, and it hadn’t changed things with Natalie and me before. He told me: he said to me, I shouldn’t ever follow anyone around, come to look for them in their lives, that’s for people who make a prison out of what they feel and lock someone up inside. He said she was a great girl and she’d never give it another thought. And as for him, I knew his tastes — no claims, God no — he said it was just a little crazy nightcap, that’s what he called it, part of the good evening we’d all had, the drinks, the laughs he and she had, cleaning up together.—

— What did you say to him?—

— I don’t know. He was talking talking talking, he was laughing, it was one of the times we had talked like this about adventures we’d had — that’s what it was. He couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop him.—

— And then what happened?—

— He wanted me to drink with him as we used to.—

— And then?—

A necessity to present the precise formulation.

—‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink.’ Those words I heard out of a babble I couldn’t follow any more. The last thing I heard him say to me. I suddenly picked up the gun on the table. And then he was quiet. The noise stopped. I had shot him.—

Duncan’s head has tipped slowly back. His eyes close against them all, Motsamai, the judge, assessors, Prosecutor, clerks, the public where some woman gasped a theatrical sob, mother and father. Harald and Claudia cannot be there for him, where he is, alone with the man shot dead in the head with a gun that was handy.

Harald felt not fear but certainty. This man, the Prosecutor, is set to trap their son into confessing that he wished to do harm to Carl Jespersen and went to the house with that intention. And maybe, to stop the questions, stop the noise, the voice directed only at him of all the throng filling this closed space, Duncan might say yes, yes — he has already confessed to killing, what more do they want of him? And this man, the Prosecutor, is only doing his job, it’s nothing to him that Jespersen is dead, that Duncan is destroyed by himself; this is this man’s performance. To do his job he must get the conviction he wants, that’s all, as a measure of his competence, one of the daily steps in the furtherance of a career. Like climbing the corporate ladder.

— You lay in the cottage all day on that Friday, 19th of January, brooding over the event of the night before?—

— Thinking.—

— Isn’t that the same thing, going over and over in your mind the injury done to you. What you desired to do about it. Wasn’t that it?—

— Not that. Because there was nothing to be done about it.—

— Yet later in the day you went over to the house. Was that not doing something about it? It was between six and seven o’clock in the evening, there was every likelihood that Jespersen would be home from work. You knew that, didn’t you?—

— I found myself in the garden, I didn’t think about who would be in the house.—

— You ‘found yourself in the garden’ and I put it to you that it was then that you also were aware that the time was right for you to carry out what you had been thinking, planning all day — to find Jespersen, take your revenge for the wrong you felt he had done you, although he was not the first man with whom your live-in lover had been unfaithful to you. I put it to you that your thinking, all day, was the brooding of jealousy, and you went to the house in a consequent aggressive mood with the intention of confronting Jespersen violently.—

The task of the Prosecutor is to make out an accused to be a liar: that is how Harald and Claudia see his process. Claudia shifts in her seat as if unable to sit there any longer, and he crushes her knuckles a moment, comfort that comes from his own resentment.

But if they knew — perhaps they partly know; Duncan is not sure what they have learnt, are learning about him — he is a liar. A liar by omission. Because the Prosecutor cannot know, is not being told — there is no telling of the staggering conflict of his feelings towards Carl Jespersen, towards Natalie, his confusion of their betrayals, a revulsion in sorrow; that was his thinking, in the cottage. Revenge: if Natalie had come back that day, why not have thought of killing her? But she — oh Natalie — she has taken enough revenge upon herself for being herself.

The gun is in court. It has become Exhibit 1. A draught of curiosity bends the companions in the public forward to try and catch a glimpse of it.

It’s nothing but a piece of fashioned metal; Harald and Claudia don’t need to see it. The fingerprints of the accused’s left hand, the Prosecutor says, were discovered upon it by forensic tests, his fingerprints unique to him in all humanity, as he is unique to them as their only son.

— You know this handgun?—

— Yes.—

— Do you own it?—

— No.—

— Who does?—

— I don’t know in whose name it was licensed. It was the gun kept in the house so that if someone was attacked, intruders broke in, whoever it was could defend himself. Everyone.—

— Did you know where it was kept?—

— Yes. Usually in a drawer in the room David and Carl shared.—

— You lived in the cottage, not the house; how did you know this?—

— We all knew. We live — lived in the same grounds together. If the others were out, and I heard something suspicious, I’d be the one who would need it.—

— You knew how to handle a gun.—

— This one. It was the only one I’d ever touched. In the army, privates were trained on rifles. David demonstrated, when it was bought.—

— On the night of January 18th the gun was brought into the living-room and shown to one of the guests who was about to acquire one for himself. Did you show it to him, handle it?—

— No. I don’t remember who did — probably David.—

— Were you aware that the gun wasn’t put away — back in the drawer in another room where it customarily was kept?—

— No. I left while the others were tidying up.—

— But you saw the gun lying about before you left? On the table near the sofa?—

— I didn’t notice the gun.—

— How was that?—

— There were glasses and plates all over the place, I suppose it was somewhere mixed up.—

— So when you entered the room the next evening you saw for the first time that the gun had been left out, lying on the table?—

— I didn’t see it.—

— How was that?—

— I wasn’t looking anywhere, only saw Carl.—

— And at what point did you see the gun?—

— I can’t say when.—

— Was it before he said ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink’ as if this was just a drinking session between mates?—

— I suppose so. I don’t know.—

— Did you know if the gun was loaded?—

— I didn’t know.—

— But weren’t you present when the use of the gun was being shown to the guest? And wasn’t he shown how — wasn’t it loaded for him?—

— I didn’t see. I suppose so. I was talking to other people.—

— So when you entered the living-room the next evening you saw the gun lying there, you had every reason to know it was loaded, and you made the decision to take the opportunity perhaps to threaten Carl Jespersen with it?—

— I didn’t threaten him, I didn’t make any decision.—

— So you didn’t give him any chance? Any warning?—

— I was hearing him, I didn’t threaten—

— No. You picked up the gun and shot him in the head. A shot you knew, because you know how to handle a gun, almost certain to be fatal. In this way you satisfied the thoughts of revenge you had been occupied with all day, and that you had gone over to the house in intention of pursuing, one way or another. The gun to hand was an opportunity presented to you, so that you didn’t have to grapple with the man fist to fist, you didn’t have to plan any other way of eliminating him as a rival in your life, your desire to do so reached fulfilment of your intentions.—

Motsamai was signalling; there is a procedure for everything in this ritual: I object M’Lord. But the judge is urbane and democratic, let everyone have his say. Objection over-ruled.

A stir along the row, people making way for someone to pass, an appearance on the witness stand singling him out like a celebrity. Khulu Dladla came and sat beside them after he had given his evidence for the Defence.

Khulu; behinds shifted to make place for him next to Claudia. She lifted her hand, it sank towards her lap then lifted again, a tendril reaching out, found and pressed a moment the large warm back of his hand.

Yes, I can say I know him well, very well, he said when Motsamai led his testimony. And the young woman? Yes, Natalie too. Since she joined our place. But Duncan, before that. In the well of the court, where no signs of recognition are exchanged, Khulu smiled directly at Duncan as if he had just walked into his presence in an ordinary room somewhere. Hi, Duncan. It was because of this that Claudia wanted to touch him.

— Before Natalie joined the friends — what were relations like between those living in the house?—

— Oh very nice. We got on well, that’s why we got together, nê?—

— You, David Baker, Carl Jespersen and Duncan Lindgard. You were all homosexuals?—

— I don’t know about Duncan, really. He didn’t live in the house. Anyway, then he brought a woman along … but the rest of us, yes, we are men. Gay.—

— Some of you were intimate with one another?—

— Yes.—

— Were you aware that Duncan had a relationship of this nature?—

— Yes.—

— And who was the man?—

— Jespersen. Carl was the kind who when he takes a fancy to someone, that person can’t escape him. He seemed to get a kick out of making it with Duncan, I don’t think Duncan had had our kind of experience before, I mean, that a man could feel that way about him, Jespersen could be such a charmer. He could make you feel like you were missing something great in life if you passed up on him. He was from overseas and all that, he thought he was special. Like some kind of food or drink from there. Something we hadn’t tried.—

— So you observed that Jespersen was having an affair with Duncan. Surely this wasn’t surprising, in your set-up?—

— No, it was. Because Duncan was straight, we knew that. There are a lot of straight people among our friends. He took the cottage and sort of shared the house not because he was one of us, gay, but because we got on well in other ways. He’s an interesting guy. I’d call him a real artist in his designs of buildings. You can work out ideas with him, politics, art, music, God — no frontiers. —

— Was Natalie James the cause of the break-up of the affair? —

— No way. It happened before she came on the scene. Jespersen got tired of it. Quickly. He was like that with everything. That’s why he’d moved around in so many countries. He broke off with Duncan.—

— What was Duncan’s reaction? Did he take the same casual attitude?—

— Not at all. He was upset. Couldn’t understand why he’d been so involved, you know, emotionally, and then just thrown over.—

— How did you know all this? From observation only?—

Khulu was looking at Duncan again, as if Duncan would join him in confirmation. — He talked to me. I didn’t know how to get him to understand … he was in a bad way … his ideas, some of them were different from ours, certainly from Carl’s.—

— Did you succeed in consoling him?—

— I think I got him to see that his reaction was, how shall I say, a bit — inappropriate, that was it, to make a fuss, a drama, was spoiling all the good things about our kind of life on the property, that he liked so much.—

— So the incident, as it seemed to you, was smoothed over?—

— Oh he calmed down.—

— He and Carl Jespersen continued to live in the group, as friends?—

— That’s right. And when he brought the girl along and set her up with him in the cottage, that looked fine, the right thing for him. At first.—

— Why ‘at first’? What happened after? Didn’t the men at the house like her?—

— We all got on with Natalie. Though Carl when he was in a bad mood would carry on with all his usual stuff about women — make fun behind Duncan’s back, sometimes, of what he said was going on in the cottage with Duncan and her — thoughts about women in general, but at the same time he and she and Duncan, well, they went along together, were good friends. We really forgot all about that business between Duncan and him. He was the one who found her that job at his advertising firm and Duncan was pleased she at last had work that might interest her, something in her line, she writes, you know.—

— So what was it that no longer looked fine, for Duncan?—

— She’s a strange person. Well, he knew that — she’d tried to kill herself, there was that business of the child — she’d he the life of the party one minute and all over him, and the next she’d be jeering at him, attacking him for what she would say was ‘he wanted her to be like that’.—

— Be like what exactly?—

— Happy. ‘Performing her life for him’—that’s exactly what she always said. That’s why I remember the words.—

— Did he tell you about this or was this type of scene taking place in the house, in front of you others?—

— Oh we were all there, around to see, to hear.—

— What was Duncan’s reaction when she taunted him in front of their friends?—

— He was so patient with her. Like with a sick person. Although she gave him hell. You could tell, it was hell. He would go about next day very depressed. But he didn’t talk to me or any of us about it — not the way he talked to me over the fling with Jespersen, for instance.—

— So the relationship between Natalie James and Duncan was not happy?—

— She tortured him. Really. She even tried again to commit suicide, it was with pills, and he seemed to think it was his fault. But you could see, he always tried again, to get her right. You couldn’t understand how he could keep on.—

— He loved her?—

Now this witness looked to the judge, who was impervious to the feel of eyes upon him. Khulu appealed to him, to all who judge, human or divine. — Who of us can say what it means to love.—

In the person of the samurai, the Prosecutor turned that face to the public in moments of solicitation during his cross examination of Dladla.

—‘Who can say what it means to love.’ Indeed, we can say that it is common knowledge that it means to be jealous. Jealousy is the passion that arises from love and is stronger than love itself, as it ruthlessly abandons all respect for the right to life of the cause of the jealousy, the man who has taken the lover’s place in the arms of the loved one. You describe the way the accused was devoted to the care of Natalie James, over-protecting her to the point when, as she has testified, this was offensive to her dignity, you have recounted his slavish attachment and behaviour. Do you not think that, with this background to the relationship, having come upon Carl Jespersen in the act with the loved one, his reaction must inevitably be jealousy? Violent jealousy. The shock that he has described — wasn’t that the extreme impact of jealousy? When he went back to the cottage that night, when he waited in vain for her to return, when he spent the day alone there, wasn’t it jealousy that he was brooding on?—

— I don’t know.—

— Wouldn’t you say he was extremely possessive about her, on the evidence of his general behaviour?—

— He felt responsible for her.—

— That may be another way of putting it. Why do you think your friend killed Carl Jespersen if it wasn’t out of premeditated jealous revenge for making love to Natalie James?—

— Killing a person.—

All around, the public is stilled with anticipation. How will he go on? It excites this audience, admitted for free, to think that the samurai has this victim cornered.

— I know Duncan; so well. He doesn’t have a gun. Nothing. He was not sitting there planning to go and kill Jespersen. It is not in his nature. Never. I swear on my own life. It couldn’t ever have happened like that: that he was going to look for Carl to kill him. I don’t know how it happened — but not that. God knows how. I don’t understand killing.—

Motsamai’s man, the Defence psychiatrist — in the blur of becoming aware of who comes and goes in the witness stand the appearance only of some irrelevance notes itself — wore an elaborate watch like a weapon, flash of light off his raised hand reaching Harald and Claudia. He addressed himself directly to the judge rather than the Defence Counsel. To emphasize objectivity? Or because they are equally of authority: the judge decides who is guilty, the psychiatrist decides who is mad. Motsamai has asked his opinion of the accused’s mental state in relation to the events in the house on January the 18th and 19th.

— In psychiatry we look at ‘life events’ as precipitating abnormal behaviour, but we also see this as consciously or subconsciously reflecting any distortion of social norms. In a society where violence is prevalent the moral taboos against violence are devalued. Where it has become, for whatever historical reasons, the way to deal with frustration, despair or injury, natural abhorrence of violence is suspended. Everyone becomes accustomed to the solution of violence, whether as victim, perpetrator or observer. You live with it. In considering abnormal behaviour, the act must take into account the general climate of behaviour in which it has taken place.—

The judge responds to this private exchange.

— All very interesting, Doctor, but what the court expects to hear is a report on the mental state of the accused, not that of the city.—

— With respect, the act that the accused has admitted he committed did not take place in a vacuum. Just as there may be the unconscious restraint which comes from the moral climate, there may be the unconscious sanction of violence, in its general use, general resort to it. This can overcome the protective inhibitions of the individual’s conscious morality in which such an act would be abhorrent. It is necessary to keep in mind this context in which events which led to the act, and the act itself, took place.—

— Are you proposing, Doctor, that hijacks, muggings and so on sanction murder as a solution to personal conflict?—

The judge’s sarcasm does not disturb the man; Motsamai would not have chosen anyone easily outsmarted in urbanity.

— No such immoral proposal, Your Lordship … Simply a duty to inform the court of the methodology followed in psychiatric examination.—

There has been a rise of attention among the public, even a policeman shifts from one foot to another like a dray-horse standing by. The public is enjoying the exchange between two men who are so sure of their superiority. This free show is getting better all the time, good as a talk-show at the television studios. But Harald and Claudia are clenched to attention in a different way, they are instantly analyzing every word. This man is theirs, Duncan’s, they are sure. What he will have confirmed in their son can only be his salvation.

He found the accused to have been precipitated into a state of dissociation from what he was doing on the evening of January 19th, unable to exert proper control over his actions, which culminated in the death of Carl Jespersen.

Motsamai has his attention. — Doctor, when would you say this state began?—

In the doctor’s opinion it was the accused’s condition before he left the cottage and entered the house. Psychiatric examination found no evidence to doubt that the accused was telling the truth when he said he went to the house to stand where he stood the previous night; his disbelief of what he had seen from there would be part of a state of dissociation from reality. Nor was there any indication that he was not truthful in telling of confusion, lack of recollection of detailed sequence of his actions when he found himself in the house and Jespersen was lying on the sofa. The accused suffers from a genuine amnesia in regard to certain events of that evening.

The judge attracts attention by moving his shoulders. Whenever he gave this signal, the court hung in balance between what had been said and what would now tip it. This time he thrust his chin forward and cocked his head. — The accused gave a detailed and coherent account of what the deceased said to him. How is it he remembers this?—

— A tremendous emotional blow is as forceful as any external blow to the head. When Jespersen said ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink’ the callousness of this attitude constituted a second such blow. He was confused before; he cannot remember what he said, if anything, to Jespersen. With the impact of these last words he recalls Jespersen saying, he would have entered a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated.—

— How could he have used a gun? If he was in this state of dissociation, diminished awareness? He’s testified he could not know whether or not the gun was loaded. Would he not have had to release the safety catch, if it was — and it was — loaded, and would not that have been a fully conscious act, a rational act?—

— It would be an automatic reaction, without cognition, in anyone who has ever handled a gun. Like getting on a bicycle for anyone who knows how to ride.—

With M’Lord’s permission, Motsamai has questions to lead.

— Doctor, in your experience of such states of diminished or total lack of capacity, what caused, what made the accused able to pick up and use the gun?—

— Cumulative provocation reaching its climax in the subject’s total loss of control.—

— Could you explain — the morphology, the case history, so to speak, of this cumulation?—

— Lindgard is a man with a bisexual nature. That in itself is a source of personality conflict. He had suffered emotional distress when he followed his homoerotic instincts and had a love affair which his partner, Jespersen, did not take seriously and broke off at whim. He overcame the unhappiness of the rejection and turned to the other, and probably dominant side of his nature, a heterosexual alliance for which, again, he took on serious responsibility. Even more so, since the alliance was with an obviously neurotic personality with complex self-destructive tendencies for which, when crossed in what she saw as her right to pursue them, she punished him with denigration and mental aggression. When he saw her in the sexual act with his former male lover, he felt himself emasculated by them both.—

This is the model of their son put together, as a human being is comprised in X-ray plates and scans lit on a screen, by the dialectic method of a court and the knowledge of experts in the mystery of what is felt and thought and acted by the model. Duncan, led away for the judge’s lunch break is the doppelgänger. How can they ask him, is this you, my son?

When they left the court building a man was capering about on his hunkers before them, a tame ape aiming a camera. The photograph that appeared in an evening paper was also something which put them together, each of them, from a kit of conceptions: mother and father of a murderer.

The Prosecutor’s questions to Motsamai’s man, their man, the Defence psychiatrist, became their self-questioning. His comments ran together as the desperate narrative of their own. Was the court to believe the day of inaction in the cottage was a vacuum? The accused testifies he was merely ‘thinking’. Can you think about nothing? Was it not clear that the day in the cottage was consistent with only one interpretation, rational premeditation of jealous intention to confront the victim in revenge — an intention duly carried out? The accused ‘found himself in the garden’; couldn’t he have gone over to the house to look again at the sofa, the scene of the previous night’s event, at any time during the day? Why did he choose instead to do so at an hour when the victim would have returned from work? As for the use of the gun, the accused said in evidence that he was not familiar with handguns; it was the only one he had held. How, then, could he have used it with such efficiency, ensuring that it was loaded and cocked, if he were to have been in a state of automatism? Did he not have to perform rational, deliberate actions in order to take advantage of the proximity of a weapon that would carry out his deadly intention?

What was the man saying, what were they themselves, what was the court being led to think? That the Defence had damned itself out of its own psychiatrist’s mouth?

They could not ask Motsamai for an interpretation of this inference — a sign ominous, or a disguised defeat; he was in his place in the well of the court preparing to close his case.

Claudia saw Harald slide a hand into his jacket pocket and bring out a notebook when Motsamai rose to address the court. It was the small hard-backed one schoolchildren use, not the embossed leather kind with attached gilt ballpoint that lay open for him at Board meetings. It belonged to the pared, humbled other life he and she lived now, he must have gone himself to a stationer’s to buy it: the sort of errand run by his secretary. Claudia had the delicacy not to give in to the distraction of covertly glancing at what he was writing while Motsamai spoke; she felt a loving empathy with him like a gentle tide, there and subsided, beneath the intent with which she was following every syllable that came from Motsamai. Not only was it Motsamai’s turn to engage attention; he was, he made himself, the focus of the court. His presence asserted that the court was for him, this short man with the drylined face like a dark worn glove, that seemed hardly to contain eyes hard as glass, bright against black; from all the years he had been shut out on the Other Side of the law he claimed the right to arrogant bearing of its dignity.

— A person is said to be criminally responsible, that is to say, to have criminal capacity, when he is able to appreciate the wrongfulness of his act at the time of committing it. To assess this criminal capacity one must be in full cognizance of the events and the consequent state of mind of such a person before the act was committed. What were the events and the state of mind in the case of Duncan Lindgard?

The previous night, towards the early hours of the morning, he is concerned for the safety of the woman he loves because she has not returned to the cottage where she lives with him in an intimate relationship. Now I want to go back a little into certain aspects of this relationship because it is significant to the character, the consistent caring nature, the sense of human responsibility of Lindgard. Natalie James attempted suicide, to take her own life, and Duncan Lindgard saved her life. It was due to his desperate efforts that she was resuscitated. He had no emotional attachment, no sexual relation with her at the time; scarcely knew her. After that, a relationship developed and he took her in. They cohabited in the cottage in the grounds of a house where three friends of Lindgard lived, and occupied the property, as the accused has described to the court, as something like a family — not mother, father, children and so forth, but adults in loyal friendship, in harmony, the three homosexual members and the heterosexual couple. Lindgard not only brought Natalie James physically back to life; as a member of the so-called family has testified, out of love for her he took on the self-appointed burden of reconciling her to the problems of her stormy past — the child she had borne and given to adoption, and other personality problems — and devoted himself to try to help her develop her positive side, the potential he saw in her that was constantly threatened by irresponsible self-destructive tendencies. In the two years or so they had cohabited as lovers there is no evidence that he responded to her mental aggression and her various transgressions threatening the relationship, with anything but patient endurance and a willingness to help her. No provocation from her brought him ever to act violently during that period. — Motsamai flashed a look to the public for a second, holding their attention ready, then was back to the judge. — With respect, M’Lord, I am not blackening this young woman’s character, I wish only to give the actual background to the accused’s concern for her in the early hours of the morning, when she failed to appear. —

It is difficult for Claudia, for Harald writing with his fist shielding the page, to keep conscious of the judge’s presence; he is, as she knows Harald believes God to be, there, even though one is not aware of this.

Motsamai’s reminder has not lost his hold on the public. — Duncan Lindgard crosses to the house, anxious that she may have been attacked by an intruder in the dark garden. What does he find? An open door, all the lights on, and on the sofa, Natalie James and Carl Jespersen in the throes of the sexual act. With respect, M’Lord, they are so engaged that they do not even spring apart at Lindgard’s presence. Ah-hêh, What does Lindgard do? The blow is so terrible, so unbelievable, that he flees. Now why was what he came upon so devastating? To any man, any woman, the sight of his or her partner performing the sexual act with another is a painful shock. No question about that. But what Duncan Lindgard was struck with was a double betrayal of an appalling nature. For what he saw on that sofa was not only the unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, but the fact that the man performing the sexual act with her was the very man with whom he himself had had a brief homosexual affair, and who had caused him pain, at that past time, by abruptly breaking off the affair. He knew only too well that Jespersen did not desire women — he has told the court how Jespersen talked distastefully, even disgustingly, about their sexual characteristics, their genital organs. That Jespersen should overcome this revulsion specifically to perform the act with Lindgard’s woman could mean only one of two things, equally horrifying: either Jespersen took some pleasure in the idea of humiliating once again the man he had already rejected, or there was an added kick to that idea in aiding Natalie in some impulse she had to take advantage of this—exquisitely—cruel way to humiliate and wound the lover to whom she felt some perverse resentment for owing him so much: her life. What Duncan saw was an act so sickening in its implications that, as he has said in his evidence of how he spent the next day thinking in the cottage, nothing could be done about it. No considered course of action would be adequate to deal with it.

He spent the next day alone in the cottage in a state of shock inconsistent with any resolution of intent. He was incapable of formulating any feelings towards either Natalie James or Carl Jespersen. As a highly-experienced psychiatrist reports, there was a sense of amnesiac unreality, in regard to them. He was not capable, as my Learned Friend has suggested he was, of any intention to take revenge. And as he himself said in response to my Learned Friend, the Prosecutor’s question: revenge for what? Her betrayal? Carl Jespersen’s betrayal? The betrayal of James and Jespersen in collusion?

He had lain in the cottage all day, incapacitated. If the dog had not roused him because it was hungry, if he had not gone through the motions of feeding the dog outside, would he not have stayed on in his isolation until, maybe, someone had come to seek him out? Would he have found himself in the garden, across which he had fled in anguish the night before, if he hadn’t gone out to feed the dog? He found himself in the garden, yes; and there was the house where what was unbelievable happened. He went over to that place to stand where he had seen it, to make it believable to his confused state.—

The lines in Motsamai’s face became deep slashes. He drew a long breath in pretext for his calculated pause. He seemed himself to be witnessing what he was about to describe.

— What does he see? The man, Carl Jespersen, is lounging at his ease on that same sofa. He has mixed himself his favourite drink. He smiles. He hails Duncan Lindgard, the friend, the former lover whose woman he has seduced before his eyes — he hails him as Bra, brother. Then he goes into a monologue, the tone is kidding along, sophisticated man-talk. That, he assumes, is the context in which the ‘incident’, the coupling that couldn’t stop, that concluded brazenly in Lindgard’s presence, must be received, shared, by Lindgard. Pour yourself a drink, he says. Yes, let’s drink on it, brother. The whole event of the night before is nothing. A grotesque joke!

Is this shock any less than that of the coupling itself?

The spectacle now before Lindgard comes as the culmination of total emotional stress. There is a gun lying on the table. It offers itself. He does not know whether it is loaded or not. He picks it up and fires at the source from which the tirade aimed at himself keeps coming. What he has described as ‘the noise’ stops. That is the way he becomes aware that he has shot Carl Jespersen.

I repeat, M’Lord, with your permission, the definition of criminal responsibility. A person is said to be criminally responsible, to have criminal capacity to perform an act, when he is able to appreciate the wrongfulness of his act at the time of committing it. Lack of criminal capacity, as a result neither of insanity nor youth, is recognized in our law in principle in regard to, among other things, provocation — M’Lord will see in my Heads of Argument I cite State versus Campher, 1987—and severe emotional stress — I refer the court to State versus Arnold, 1985.

Everything in the accused’s attested general behaviour as an adult, his sense of moral responsibility, Christian and humanist, as inculcated since childhood by his parents, is against the performance of any violent act. Was he not provoked beyond rational endurance to loss of control when he saw a gun to hand and picked it up? In a word, did the accused know what he was doing? Did Duncan Lindgard have criminal capacity?

I submit, M’Lord, that he did not, could not.—

The voice of the judge, a private murmur, has nevertheless the authority to stop Motsamai rather than interrupt. — Mr Motsamai, are you pleading insanity?—

— No, M’Lord. I am not.—

— Temporary insanity?—

— No. The accused is a man of sound mind whose lack of criminal capacity was overcome by a brain-storm of emotional stress during which he could not be aware of the wrongfulness of his act because he was not aware of any intention to commit it.—

— What is the difference between that and temporary insanity?—

Your son is not mad.

But for Harald and Claudia, the judge may be right; insanity, perhaps that sorrow might be the explanation they have never had from their son. Not even what he has said in court has given them what they want — it seems to replay, as if Motsamai’s voice with its emphases from the rhythms of his African language is a broadcast overlaid: Duncan’s presence interrupts, it was not that, it was not exactly like that. Nobody here knows. Perhaps there really is a frequency, coming from him where he is seated, turned away from them in the well of the court.

— Loss of self-control as inability to act in appreciation of wrongfulness, M’Lord, as against delusions confusing right and wrong. That is the difference.—

Harald felt Claudia’s head disturb the space between them, stirring in denial; yes, the response seemed not to be Motsamai at his best. And perhaps he was wrong; temporary insanity, something in Duncan’s brain that had been there always, the mystery that is the other individual, even the one you have created out of your own flesh? Claudia made as if to whisper something hut Harald put up the hand holding a pen; dismay was wordless, it was as if the heating up of air in the crowded space was generated between Harald, Claudia and their son, overcoming everyone.

— Duncan Lindgard had no intention whatever to kill Jespersen. There was no premeditation. He had, he has, no criminal capacity to commit such an act. Brought about by provocation under severe emotional stress, it was done in lack of criminal capacity. His confession, his past history, his testimony are indisputable proof of that.—

— Have you concluded, Mr Motsamai?—

— Thank you, M’Lord. The case for the Defence is closed.—

The judge rose, the court was adjourned. There was a coming to life among the public like that at the end of the act in any theatre; they would be back. In the corridors, Motsamai become Hamilton put a hand on the forearm each of Harald and Claudia, drawing them together with him. He had the abstracted animation he showed when he came to chambers from a lunch. It’s gone well enough, he said to his confidants, leaving his attorney, Philip the good friend, standing by with an arm-load of documents. They did not ask him about the insanity aspect, the question — what could they term it?

In his hands.

We’re neither of us going to call any further witnesses, he told them, with a that-suits-me pause and shrug. We? He was in a hurry to consult with his attorney. As he left them they saw him greet his opponent, the Prosecutor; the two gowned men paused, Motsamai’s arm resting briefly on the other’s shoulder, shaking their heads over something, laughed together, swept past one another.

So it was all a performance, for them, for the judge, the assessors, the Prosecutor, even Motsamai. Justice is a performance.

As he and Claudia wandered the corridors, Harald slid something back into his pocket. It was the notebook he had found and taken from the table beside the bed, in the cottage.

Tomorrow it will be over. There will be the verdict.

We. Motsamai and the Prosecutor — each has decided not to call further evidence, either in indictment or mitigation. In agreement; over their tea: Harald is ready to believe. This kind of thinking was to be reduced to the lowest point in himself.

For him, here is another kind of evidence: the lack of any integrity, in the two opposing counsel, to the principled attacks they make upon one another’s submissions in court. Claudia does not find surprising their professional camaraderie outside the referee’s authority of the judge; she knows that to do your work well you concentrate on the process, uninvolved with personal feelings. In a café with Khulu, they talk about this quietly, between long pauses, while he has gone off to buy a newspaper.

I think a judge would be irritated by a lawyer who showed emotional attachment to a client. Maybe even inclined to be sceptical of the argument of someone suspected of going further than his professional commitment to defend. After all, they have to defend anybody. It’s anyone’s right to be defended, isn’t it. We know that.

So Hamilton doesn’t care what happens to Duncan. Apart from winning his case. Tomorrow he and the Prosecutor shake hands across the net, no matter who’s won.

She refilled his cup, they, too, deal with the question of Duncan’s life in the interim over a pot of tea. After a while, seeing Khulu coming back to them, she spoke quickly.

He cares. Hamilton cares, all right. You must believe that? Harald? Surely he’s shown it. To us. But the court’s not the place, not there.

Khulu held up the paper in acknowledgment of his return. She was watching him making his way through lanes of tables.

And that’s the other one who does. Who would have thought he’d be the one who’d know we need someone with us every day, and it turns out we’d want nobody but him.

Claudia prescribed a sleeping pill for herself and went to bed.

Harald alone in the living-room took out the notebook and added, in reflection, details of the trial. He did not know what the purpose of these notes was. The question was put to himself as his attention wandered and came to rest on dead flowers in a vase; the only answer was the man, Khulu’s. I don’t understand killing. He tried to find a practical purpose for the notes; if there were to be an appeal against sentence, he would want to be able to refer to the impressions he had of how evidence that led to sentence (Duncan hasn’t waited for judgment, there’s only the degree of guilt, this play on words with culpability that Hamilton Motsamai’s counting on) was received by the laconic judge, the silent assessors, the lawyers, even the clerks, your Indian and Afrikaner girls entered into a male domain, and those mannequins of the law, the policemen standing by without emanating human presence. Even the bodies pressed about Claudia and him — their reactions. Because all there are old hands, familiars of which way things are going in a trial and must know signs he and Claudia miss or cannot read.

Or maybe what he is recording simply belongs along with what Duncan had written there and that he, Harald, has read in transgression of his own codes of behaviour. Probably it will go to the box in the cupboard where that letter the boy wrote from school has lain so long.

The word performance keeps rising. He sees he wrote down his nadir reached: Justice is a performance. Scribbled what he has described as Hamilton’s self-promoting ‘performance’; and then Khulu Dladla’s quote from the girl — that Duncan wanted her to be ‘performing her life’ for him. He turned on the television to keep himself from going to bed unable to sleep (he refuses Claudia’s prescription of a tranquillizer or sleeping pill, she thinks — privately — that he is one of those fortunately disciplined individuals who have the subconscious instinct that there is in them something that would lead to addiction) but what was offered was just another performance, a rock group contest on one channel and a sitcom in a language he didn’t understand, on another.

He sat on, the notebook under his hand, and turned to the radio. He had come upon the middle of one of the phone-in programmes on subjects of public preoccupation, from abortion to supermarket prices and the culling of elephants, which are the circuses provided by democracy so that those who have bread but are aware that it is not true that anybody can (as opposed to ‘may’) become president have the opportunity and recognition at least of hearing his or her own voicing of opinions and frustrations aloud to the populace. The callers are, however meandering and inarticulate (he usually switches off at once), sometimes calling up deep impulses that lie beneath conformation to the ethos of their time and place. The Death Penalty: this was what talk-show democracy was open about to these eager citizens, this night. But the Death Penalty will be abolished! In-the-know Motsamai is certain of it. It will be proved a violation of the Constitution; there is no possibility, now, that Duncan — God forbid, and He has — could have sentence of death passed on him for what he has done, whyever he did it?

This is a civilized country now, and the State does not commit murder. But as Harald sits with his gaze fixed on the flowers that should have been thrown away he hears them, those callers for the death cell and the rope, early mornings with the hangman in Pretoria. They want, they still want, they are ready to demand over the air, for everyone, the President, the Minister of Justice, the Constitutional Court to hear — they want a corpse for a corpse, a murderer for a murderer. And they stumble indignantly through what can’t be denied: the satisfaction they feel, the only reconciliation there is for them, lies in the death of one whose act took one of their own, or whose example threatens other lives. Their voices relayed over the telephone to the studio, the patronizing check on their verbosity by the presenter — for them the Death Penalty cannot be abolished. They — the people clamouring out there beyond the townhouse complex and the prison where Duncan awaits the verdict of his trial — they will condemn him to death in their minds no matter what sentence the judge passes down upon him, no matter how many assurances of mitigation Motsamai, out of his knowledge, his cleverness, his experience gives. In the air of the country, they are calling for a referendum; they, not the Constitutional Court will have the Last Judgment on murderers like Duncan. And referendum or not, Harald hears and knows, his son and sleeping Claudia’s shall have this will to his death surrounding him as long as he lives. The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it.

No performance; this is reality.

She turned in her sleep and was awakened by the sense of emptiness beside her; felt for her watch. The luminous message: past two o’clock. She got up as Duncan had done and went to find the missing one. The door to the bathroom that was what the townhouse complex’s brochure called en suite with the bedroom was ajar; no-one there. The living-room was dark and mum. She went cautiously down the passage as if she thought to meet an intruder. In the second bathroom Harald was lying, asleep in the tub, his head supported on the rim but his body, to Claudia, that of a drowned man.

Motsamai has assured his client, the accused, as well: tomorrow it will be over. And it has gone very encouragingly: he is confident. Colleagues who have been following the case say ten years, and of course there’s always remission. But he, Motsamai, he thinks he has succeeded in a manner that has a good chance of seven. And then, with remission … The best way to talk to Duncan, he knows, is to do so as if Duncan were a fellow lawyer and they were considering someone else’s case in which both were interested. That is the way, he is sensitive to, this young man in deep trouble can best manage himself; but he cannot resist repeating, indeed, as if to a colleague — Extremely well, particularly the cross examination with her.—

They’ve all gone away to await tomorrow when it will be over for them: his mother, his father, Khulu their proxy son he sees sits beside them where he cannot be, Motsamai, the judge, the girl clerks with their hair falling over their arms as they touch the keyboards of their word-processors, the faces of the spectators of his life; gone home. Alone. His parents, his friend Khulu (he hadn’t realized, until now, how that one in the house really was his friend among the others) feel bad about leaving him behind, particularly this time, he knows, but he is relieved to have them gone.

So Motsamai, playing father when father cannot, has saved him at the cost of her. Natalie/Nastasya. He has opened her up and exposed her, dissected her womb with a baby in it, held out for all to see her mind and motives and body whose force and contradictions a lover knew only too well. Who will put Natalie together again; no-one. Motsamai is confident; this time she has saved him.

During the night, he did not dream in his cell but lived a fantasy while wakeful. Ten years, with remission, whatever spell of time has gone by, he comes out blinking into the sun, the city. Someone points to a child. Is it a girl, it looks like Natalie/ Nastasya. No, it’s a boy, it looks like us, Carl and Duncan.

Motsamai is wearing a particularly well-cut suit and the close coir of his hair has been shaped, the 19th-century African chief’s wisp of chin-beard is combed to assert its mobile emphasis when he’s speaking; this is the care Harald’s business colleagues will take with their appearance on the day an important meeting is scheduled.

Motsamai was waiting for them in the corridors where echoes of everything they have heard in court in the past days is trapped under the high ceilings. He walked them along with calm tread through the skitter of clerks and messengers and the wandering of people looking for this court or that. When he found a little space for them he stopped. — You’re all right, Claudia? I hope you had a night’s rest, Harald. Me? Oh I always sleep, when I finally do get to bed if I’m preparing myself … Ah-hêh. Today. Now look, I’ve got the Prosecutor to agree that you can see Duncan at the lunch break. You know — it’ll be after everything’s concluded this morning, I don’t expect the verdict and so forth until the afternoon. So you’ll see him. Before it’s handed down.—

When you find yourself confronted — can’t look away, no evasion of propriety, class or privilege possible — with justice, you understand: the defenders and the prosecutors come to a reasonable settlement on the price of a murder. For Harald — that’s what’s been agreed. Motsamai’s Learned Friend, for the State, is satisfied he’s exacted all he can get. Motsamai himself — he actually makes a balancing gesture, his two hands are the scales: let well alone. — judges are touchy people. Ah-hêh. You know? They get tired like us — when you keep on going after they’ve made up their minds. There’s a stage at which … You follow me? He sits with his assessors and the verdict is there. More evidence — that’s not going to affect it. We’ve made our impression with our witnesses, our cross examination. I don’t want to disturb this with over-kill. With regard to sentence — that’s something else. (He’s using the phrase as one of the double entendre expressions in his voguish sophistication, implying not only another matter but also something exceptional.) I’ll be applying myself to that this afternoon.—

They sit with Khulu through the summings-up. The Prosecutor and the Senior Counsel for the Defence each review with succinct force and conviction what they have already submitted on the evidence in chief, elicited, each according to his own purpose and skill, from accused and witnesses during that process and in cross examination.

Duncan is a fanatically possessive man who jealously premeditated revenging himself, harming Carl Jespersen who had sexual intercourse with his lover, Natalie James, and, in full awareness of the situation, in purposeful behaviour, in full capability, with criminal capacity, took advantage of the availability of a gun and deliberately shot the man where he knew it would be fatal, in the head.

Harald and Claudia and Khulu follow in common comprehension only these key terms in what comes from the samurai face the Prosecutor is wearing: criminal capacity, purposeful behaviour, full awareness. The combinations of phrases ignite as words in a column of newspaper set alight run together in flame. In a single attention, they scarcely hear the connecting sequence, the sense of the Prosecutor’s long discourse. These legalistic terms, set down in the books of reference both Defence Counsel and Prosecutor have on their tables, are what will pronounce judgment of Duncan. When it is Hamilton’s, Motsamai’s turn, the three become separate attentions again, each listening with a different silent accompaniment, out of different ideas of what Duncan is, to every word, detail, nuance in what Motsamai is saying.

Duncan is a man totally without violent instincts, as his record of behaviour and caring for a mentally aggressive partner shows. As he well knew, there was no love affair possible between his former homosexual lover and the woman to whom he himself devoted such loving care. Therefore there was no jealous premeditation of violence or any other form of action towards the man. What he was suddenly confronted with on the night of January 18th was a shameless spectacle of crude sexual exhibitionism performed by these two people. Would not any violent man have attacked Jespersen at once? He certainly would. Duncan Lindgard did not attack Jespersen then and there, as any violent instincts undoubtedly would have led him to. All next day the shock and pain incapacitated him, he could not go to work. Scarcely believing he had seen what he had seen, he went back to the house only to look again at where it happened. Jespersen’s unexpected presence on the very sofa where the degrading spectacle had taken place, Jespersen’s incredible lack of shame, his assumption that it could just be brushed aside between men who were brothers, once even been lovers, over a drink together — this was a second terrible shock on top of the first. Equalling the force of a blow to the head, psychiatric evidence bears out, such shock has the effect of producing blankout.

An interruption from one of the two presences, the Greek chorus of the assessors forgotten round the judge deity: the white one asks, What is that? You used that word before. You mean a blackout?

— What is a blankout? A blankout is not a blackout, a state when the individual loses consciousness. A blankout is the state in which the individual suffers loss of self-control, a loss in which there is inability to act in accordance with appreciation of wrongfulness, a state of criminal incapacity. It was in this state that, as a result of provocation and severe emotional stress, Duncan Lindgard picked up the gun that was lying there and silenced his tormentor with a shot.—

No-one — Harald, Claudia, Khulu — Duncan? — what was Duncan looking for in him — no-one could have any idea of the judge’s reactions from the face inclined slightly over the papers apparently being ordered under his precise hands. Perhaps (this is what Harald believes) he has, as Motsamai suggests, made up his mind on the verdict much earlier; or perhaps he is going with his two assessors who ramble behind him for the lunch adjournment like companionable dogs, to decide with them what it was that Duncan really did when he shot a man in the head. For it becomes clear to those who witness a trial that there is no such act as the simple act of murder. To kill is only the definitive act arising out of many others surrounding it, acts of spilled words, presumptions, sexual congress, and, all around these, muggings in the streets.

Motsamai offers no experienced observations he may have made of the judge’s reception of his summing-up and that of the Prosecutor, and Harald and Claudia don’t have the sense that it is right to ask him. It would be like questioning his effectiveness; making him feel the weight of them, finally, in his hands. His demeanour is Senior Counsel Motsamai rather than Hamilton as he leads them, at last, to what they have never seen, a cell. It is not quite the cell where Duncan has been led back to as they left him after the visitors’ room, but a cell under the well of the court where prisoners are kept during the intervals of their trials.

Corridors and steps and doors for which warders have bracelets of keys. It’s a cellar-like place and in a comer behind a knee-high wall there’s a lavatory bowl. Some wooden chairs with numbers chalked on them. There is a plate of food on the seat of one. Duncan, their son, is standing with a glass of water in his hand, he feels for somewhere to put it down, it wobbles against the plate. He embraces his mother, a hug as he always used to when he came for a meal, and then presses his father to him, the touch of his beard against Harald’s cheek and ear something unfamiliar to them both.

Motsamai had left them alone; the presence of warders, policemen, has long ceased to count, with them. — He’s confident about this afternoon. — Claudia is the first to speak. But what does that mean, confident? Duncan’s gentle smile: it says he does not need the judge to tell him he did what he did.

— The circumstances. — Harald can’t quite bring himself to make full reference to everything that has been done to Duncan and everything Duncan has done, but he wants to take the three of them to the safety of the concession by justice — extenuating circumstances; salvation has come down to this practical compromise from its place on High.

— Anyway. I’m glad it will be over for you two soon. Time for you to get back to work, I’m sure. Take things up.—

Harald doesn’t want to be pictured sitting in a board room, he’s here, for his son in a cell. — How did you feel about Motsamai, the way he handled it, was it what you expected? I couldn’t see at all what was going on with you.—

— I left it all to him. Except when I was on the stand myself. I said what I had to say, that’s all. The rest is his work, his decisions.—

— It’s a good thing you trusted him. There’s so much it’s difficult for people like us to understand — about the process, I mean.—

He can’t ask their son about the real subject they can’t help circling, Motsamai’s cross examination of the girl. What might be crucial for the verdict, what Motsamai did to that girl — how does he feel about Motsamai using like this Natalie whom he loved — loves? She stayed with him because he was ‘more dreadful than the water’, it’s in the notebook — only Harald and his son know it, Harald thought from time to time in Motsamai’s chambers he ought to show him the notebook but, unknown to his son that he had stolen it, he kept it between him and his son. Now the son has had to stand by between warders and watch her destruction by a lawyer because he has, yes, done something more dreadful, far worse than her choice to drown herself, taken a life not his own to take. Because of what he came upon on the sofa that night, did he rejoice to see her subjected to Motsamai’s tactics? I left it all to him. Was there now a new solitariness, a new suffering to add to all the others that had assailed him, now it is bitterness against the man who has destroyed Natalie/Nastasya, a turning against the man in whose hands he was, no-one else can do anything for him, not even the parents who made a covenant always to be there for him? Inside Harald there cried out in anger to his God, is there no end to what my son has to bear?

— Has Motsamai said anything to you about what you might expect? — Claudia says this because she can’t believe there really will be a verdict this afternoon and then a sentence passed next morning, the judge and his assessors will settle themselves into their chairs again and she will hear it.

— Yes, we’ve talked. I hope he has, to you and Dad as well.—

Harald answered. — He has. But of course, it’s only what he thinks, I mean from some precedent. All the time, no sign of what the judge was concluding about anything, even when he interrupted, asked something, or objected to something — I tried to make out whether he was impressed, disbelieving, whatever. But they’re past masters at the neutral voice and the expressionless face.—

— Like the deadpan of a tough negotiator you’re used to in the Board Room, Dad.—

He forces them to smile.

— Khulu sends his greetings — a message. You have it, Harald?—

Harald has written, at Khulu’s dictation, on a page torn from the back of the notebook: UNGEKE UDLIWE UMZWANGEDWA SISEKHONA. He gives the piece of paper to Duncan.

— Do you understand?—

— The gist. I’ve picked up a bit of Zulu from him.—

— What does it mean? You know he’s been with us nearly all the time.—

He doesn’t answer his mother at once, not because he is unsure of the translation but because what it is, is hard to speak out in this hour, between the three of them.

— Something like, you will never be alone because we are alone without you.—

It’s been said for them, the parents, there is nothing more to be said. They clung to the rest of their precious time with their son, talking a surface made of matters meaningless to all three, which could at least hold above sheer fall.

When it was time for the judge to convene the afternoon sitting of the court, one of the warders, a young Afrikaner, led them, and turned to regard Duncan. — He should eat something, lady. It’s no good on an empty stummick. Your mother wants you to eat something, man.—

There has been, there is, no silence like the silence in a court when the judge lifts his head to hand down judgment. All other communication, within and without, is stilled; all is ended.

This is the last word.

She sits with hands trapped under her thighs as if in recognition of the irritation he has endured in being aware, in this place, the past days, of her beside him constantly turning the nail of her thumb under the rim of each nail. Khulu is with them. Khulu sits at her other side.

And darkness fell upon the land.

Each of the three is in the state of intense concentration that, as he, her husband, once tried to explain to her, was Simone Weil’s definition of prayer. He doesn’t know if he’s praying; there is doubt about everything for him. What is habit praying for now — twelve years could be the maximum, ten likely, Hamilton says seven, eight is the leniency expected — it’s implied — as the triumph of the Defence.

He/she. They don’t look at their son now. There is no gaze able to reach him; the well of the court is not only the measure that sets him apart, in this enclosure within what everyone else experiences of the world — his progenitors, friends, the messenger Verster, the woman who knows we are all creatures of love and evil, are among them. Even Motsamai has done with him; whatever the bond was, the succour nobody, nobody else could give, it soon shall belong to the next client.

A judge takes his time. There must be nothing precipitate about the law. Twelve years, if it is to be twelve years, there is no hurry to decide a verdict on what will take so long to serve.

Does a sentence begin from the moment the verdict is pronounced, like the striking of a clock that signals a new hour to commence — My Lord Jesus Christ! — how demeaning it has been, all along, to be content to be an ignoramus, apparently immune from contact with the secular processes of crime and punishment! Only to have understood sins to be absolved by one of Your servants, mornings at confession. With great effort, he touches her arm and her hand comes out from suppression beneath the weight of her body so that he takes it. She has released the other hand, too. He is aware of Khulu’s slight side-glance on him, on her. He sees Khulu’s hand take this other hand.

The judge is feeling for something in the recesses of his robes; it was a handkerchief. The judge blows his nose, working the cloth up into one nostril, wipes the comers of his lips, replaces the handkerchief.

The judge looks out once, over the assembly, and then begins to address himself.

— The accused, Duncan Peter Lindgard, is charged with murder, arising out of the killing of Carl Jespersen, a fellow resident on a communally-occupied property. The accused’s plea of not guilty is based on the defence of lack of criminal capacity, defined as temporary non-pathological incapacity.—

Our son is not mad.

— An accused person who submits non-pathological causes in support of a defence of criminal incapacity is required to lay a factual foundation sufficient for the court to decide the issue of the accused’s criminal responsibility for his actions having regard to the expert evidence and to all the facts of the case, including the nature of the accused’s actions during the period relevant to the alleged crime.

The defence to the charges is that owing to extreme stress and provocation he had been unable to form the intention required to commit the alleged crime; unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions or act in accordance with such appreciation, and unable to engage in any purposeful conduct.—

There is something salutary, necessary, for Harald and Claudia, perhaps even for their son himself, in this plain setting out of facts that, within themselves, have been so overgrown by emotion and entangled out of comprehension by distress.

— The main events of the night of Thursday, January 18th, 1996, have been proved by evidence which is either common cause or not seriously disputed. A party took place with the arrival of friends of the occupants of the main house on the property, David Baker, Nkululeko Dladla, Carl Jespersen, and the occupants of the cottage on the property, Natalie James and the accused. The accused and Natalie cohabited as heterosexual lovers, the three men in the house were homosexuals, with Baker and Jespersen as a couple. Before his relationship with Natalie, the accused had had a homosexual relationship with Jespersen, but this does not appear to have affected the close friendship, the amicable sharing of what was virtually a single household by the five individuals.—

And as he delivers the next statement the judge looks up, head lifted, straight out to the public assembly, for the first time.

— They even owned and knew how to use, a gun, in common. —

It is also a first hint of any personal attitude to the case. The context of the case. He has allowed himself the show of a brief ironic comment for those, like the father of the accused, who are sophisticated enough to interpret it as a shrug of disapproval of the household he has, dispassionately, and without prejudice on sexual mores, described. The significance of the shared gun (‘they even’) as a symbol of the shared interchangeable relations there distracts Harald as something he should have gone into, wanted to all along but that can’t be attended to now, no no, because every phrase that comes from this man is selective progress in the discourse of judgment, you must keep up with him, read between the lines (read his lips, of their intent) at the same time as you miss no single word. Harald wants to convey to Claudia and Khulu this attitude he sees purposely let slip by the judge, but there’s no time even to alert them with a glance.

— When the party broke up that night and guests left, accompanied by Nkululeko Dladla, David Baker retired to bed in the house and the accused went to the cottage after an altercation with Natalie, who stayed behind, volunteering to assist Jespersen to tidy up and wash dishes.—

He has his audience now. For all those others round the parents and their surrogate son Khulu, here is a drama addressed directly to them. They’ve seen in the flesh some of the characters; up there, on the witness stand. They are invited to share the right of familiarity the judge takes to himself, referring to one of the leading characters in the affair not as he does the men, by their surnames, but simply as ‘Natalie’, because she’s only a woman. If Claudia reads the lips of the man up there on the bench, his patronage is an aside unimportant to her today; or maybe for her it is all the respect from anyone this bitch should expect.

— Some two hours later, the accused wakened in the cottage and found that Natalie had not returned. Concerned for her safety crossing the garden so late, he went to the house, where he came upon Natalie and Jespersen in flagrante delicto, engaged in the sexual act on the sofa in the living-room. They became aware of his presence but he did not confront them. He went back to the cottage. Natalie did not come to the cottage; she took her car and drove away.—

With the daring matter-of-fact of this account his attention has left his audience. His eyes are on his text again; let them contemplate the salacious scene he has just presented.

— The accused, an architect, did not go to work on Friday, January 19th. He stayed in the cottage, alone, all day. Some time between 6.30 and 7 p.m. — he does not recall looking at his watch, and a gardener, the only witness that he went to the house, since he saw him return, does not own a watch — during that period the accused emerged from the cottage, fed his dog, and walked through the garden to the house. There, with the door open to the garden as it had been the night before, Jespersen was lying on the sofa drinking a sundowner. He made light of the incident of the previous night, claiming a shared brotherly context of the sexual mores of the communal household, and suggested that the accused join him with a drink.—

No, no he didn’t feed the dog on the way to the house, that’s the way it’s been phrased to sound but it was to feed the dog, not to go to the house, that he left the cottage! This isn’t just a detail! It may be vital! The judge has let them down, deviated from the trust warily granted him. Claudia and Khulu are aware of a sudden surge of agitation in Harald but do not know its particular source. Claudia turns to Khulu, and he draws his face into planes of troubled assurance: it may be that Harald is momentarily overcome by the totality of where they are, what is actually taking place this day. The gun, that’s what the judge is bringing up now. He, Khulu, has held that gun, flipped it over in his hand, once or twice, yes.

— The house gun, which had been produced as a demonstration model for one of the guests of the previous night who intended to acquire one, had been left lying on a table. With it, the accused shot Jespersen in the head where he lay. The shot was fatal. On his way back to the cottage the accused dropped the gun in the garden, where he was observed by Petrus Ntuli, a plumber’s assistant who worked as a part-time gardener on the property in exchange for accommodation in an outhouse. David Baker and Nkululeko Dladla came home shortly after and found the deceased’s body. They ran to the cottage to tell the accused but there was no response to their calls or knocking on the door, so they presumed he was not there. They called the police who in the course of searching the garden came upon Petrus Ntuli who told them the accused was in the cottage and that he, Ntuli, had seen him drop something on his way to the cottage from the house. The police found the gun, effected entry to the cottage, arrested the accused and took him to the police station for questioning. He was charged with murder. The gun, Exhibit 1, bears his fingerprints. —

These are the facts — but what about the reasons for coming out of the cottage, what about the intention, the dog! The dog!

— None of the facts has been disputed by the Defence. This granted, what the assessors and I have had to decide in handing down judgment is the validity of the claim of temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity submitted by the Defence on behalf of the accused. I cite, exceptionally, ‘on behalf of’ although it goes without saying that any counsel’s chosen defence is proxy for an accused, because in this case the accused has not taken the right to defend himself vociferously.

He denies that he spent Friday in the cottage brooding on revenge against the deceased. He said in evidence ‘Revenge for what. I don’t own either of them, they are free to do as they like’—thus indirectly defending himself against premeditation of his crime, but he does not emphasize the responsibility the couple bore in gross violation of his feelings; he describes his reactions that night as something generated within, by himself, without attribution of blame to them. In reply as to whether he thought of any revengeful accusation, let alone action, against the couple, he said ‘All I could remember — about seeing them there like that — was … a disintegration of everything, disgust with myself, everyone …’

Similarly, he makes no categorical denial, forcefully expressed, of the suggestion that when he walked across the garden to the house on Friday evening, he had the intention of confronting Jespersen. All he offered the court was the oblique statement ‘I found myself in the garden … I didn’t want to talk to anyone … I think then I had to find myself standing again where I stood in the doorway.’ He is referring to the previous night, when he came upon the couple. The Defence has interpreted this statement as standing for his disbelief — that is to say, what he saw in the house that night could not have happened; he had to go back, as if to verify the mise en scène. We unanimously find this interpretation acceptable. The State’s allegation that the accused spent the day of Friday, 19th January, premeditating revenge on the deceased is borne out neither by the content of the accused’s evidence nor the manner of his delivery, which, to those like myself and the assessors, accustomed to the tenor and timbre of lying, have the characteristics of truth.—

A new tension — hope — holds the three. Harald and Claudia stiffen, recklessly afraid to let go, in any contact. It is so unexpected, this show of understanding by one who is judging Duncan, nothing contradictory to be read from the tips — is it at all usual for such empathy with an accused to be expressed in the course of a judgment? How can they know? Can’t ask the one who would: Motsamai, he’s unreachable in the well of the court beside his client. Harald hears Claudia’s fast breathing from a thumping heart. Their son is not mad and he is not a liar. What he says (and his body doesn’t contradict it) has the characteristics of truth. If Motsamai, Hamilton, could relay some answer? — does the truth count? Can the truth save you?

And while these questions take height, they suddenly plummet again. What is the judge delivering himself of now? Motsamai, Hamilton! — is judgment a one-man game in which the player challenges himself, enjoys shifting conclusions to weigh down first one side of the famous scales, then the other?

— Absence of premeditation, however, does not imply subsequent criminal incapacity in the actual perpetration of a crime, the series of actions by which a crime is committed at the time. If it is accepted that the accused went from the cottage to the house to convince himself that what he saw on the sofa in the living-room the previous nighr actually happened, only to look once again at the scene (the judge seems to lose concentration for a moment, preoccupied wearisomely with some matter surfacing in him from his own life, but perhaps he’s paused for effect, he’s a pro, they’re all pros, his assessors, his prosecution and defence teams) … what he actually saw was the man Jespersen, on that same sofa. There followed convincing evidence, confirmed by both State and Defence psychiatrists’ expert opinions, of a second profound shock, the outrage of Jespersen’s callous assumption that what happened the previous night before the accused’s eyes was trivial, to be passed off over a drink between men.—

Like the arm on the shoulder, between Prosecutor and Defence Counsel in the corridors, passing over the scene in court where the one has been condemning a man and the other defending him. But Harald knows he should he the last one to be disillusioned by professional ethics; disillusion once begun, these days, here in this place, has ended up with his questioning his own.

— It does not require any preparation of premeditation for a conscious and rational determination to take revenge to be suddenly aroused at such a moment. The means of revenge in such circumstances is most likely to be some form of physical attack, with bare hands or whatever may serve as a weapon. It is unfortunate that a deadly weapon, a gun, was casually accepted as part of the household in that living-room and that it was lying on the table.—

How to follow the twists and turns, the swift about-face of what the man’s saying as he retreats and advances, down over his text, up to take them into his confidence again; there is the desperation of half-grasping a direction his mind is taking, only to have it snatched away as if attention has been disastrously lost for precious seconds — what did that mean, what was the order of words that are the clues to be followed to a verdict forming? Each loses the way and is impatient with anxiety to know if the other has caught what is missing, and yet cannot risk to interrupt attention by whispering the question.

— But the accused could have chosen bare hands; instead he chose to pick up the gun and shoot Jespersen in the head. He has said in evidence ‘The noise stopped.’ What he didn’t want to hear from Jespersen was silenced in the ultimate revenge, the taking of another’s life.—

Not a liar, but a murderer.

Claudia sees that her whole life was moving towards this moment. All the ambitions she had so naively decided she was going to fulfil, when she was a girl, all the intentions of dedication to healing she has had in her adulthood — they were to come to this. The end is unimaginable; if we knew it from the start we would never set out.

— The District Surgeon’s report is that the shot was accurately directed to a vital part, the forehead, consistent with deliberate action. Whether this means a certain series of actions had to be consciously taken to aim and fire it, as the State submits, or whether, as the Defence submits, to the hand of anyone who is familiar with a gun the necessary preparation to fire comes automatically, without conscious volition, is now the crucial matter on which the question of criminal capacity, as the State submits, or temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity, as the Defence argues, must be considered, having regard to the expert evidence and all the facts of the case, including not only the nature of the accused’s actions during the period immediately relevant to the crime, but also the circumstances that preceded it in the personal history of the accused.—

The sonorous maze of clauses dazes. Even the uttermost limit of attention which is prayer lands in dead ends, turns upon premises which it seems to have just left. During passages like this the ranks of spectators rustle. All the pros and cons are no business of theirs, they wait for the narrative to recommence, a judgment is the remnant of the oral tradition round the fire; they’re there to be told an exciting story.

Now it’s taken up again, good, it’s about the young man they’ve been able to study, face, gestures (what the judge called his ‘manner’) on the witness stand. It’s about a murderer.

— Both State and Defence psychiatrists find that the accused’s intellect is within high limits, his judgment sound. He is a young professional man of good family, apparently with a promising career ahead of him. There is no basis on which to question the Defence’s submission that everything in the accused’s behaviour as an adult has been contrary to the performance of any violent act. The evidence of a member of the common household, Nkululeko Dladla, states of the accused ‘It is not in his nature to kill.’—

And there he is, that Dladla, sitting with the murderer’s parents, right here. People turning to look at him: it is as if he himself has spoken, a hefty black man who wears like campaign medals the insignia of the gay, his tryst rings and necklaces. Harald and Claudia are moved by the judge’s quotation of Khulu and are graced to be identified in the focus of attention that has reached him; under it Khulu is rubbing his fist back and forth across his jaw-line as he often does, they’ve noticed, when he wants to emphasize something he has said in his calm way.

Ah but listen to this, Harald and Claudia are saying simultaneously, without words, to one another, as the judge’s narrative takes another unexpected turn, listen to this!

— Indeed, demonstrably, it has been in his nature to succour. The accused met Natalie when she had made a suicide attempt, and, on her own admittance, brought her back to life. After they commenced to live together as lovers, he saved her again from suicide. Although he was passionately in love with her, that the relationship was not a happy one is confirmed not only by Natalie herself, but by Dladla. It seems she was not grateful to the accused for saving her life. Asked why the relationship she and the accused had chosen was not happy, she replied in evidence ‘He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.’ Her attitude towards him as revealed under cross examination by the Defence was resentful, giving credence to Dladla’s statement that although the accused ‘was patient with her … like a sick person … she gave him hell.’ She taunted him before other members of the common household. The indifference, if not defiance, with which she told the court that the child she is expecting might he either the deceased’s or the accused’s appears to be a particularly malicious example of taunting the man who loves her and is on trial for a crime passionnel of which her action is half, if not the whole cause.—

A judge knows everything. He’s the vicar of the god of justice, as the priest is the vicar of God, he’s privy to the confessional of the court, where witnesses and experts and the accused tell what Harald and Claudia would never have learnt. This knowledge, it’s the basis of justice, isn’t it? To know all is to forgive all? — no, that’s fallacious. The man’s dead, shot in the head. He’s here under the ground of the city where this court is the seat of justice. But to know all: the judge is not going to follow, is he, any pressure for society’s angry retribution, society being represented by the State; he’s concerned with the fate of the individual as well. Motsamai must be thinking — what? Hope: it can’t be repressed. Duncan; but it’s somehow an intrusion to wonder what he’s thinking, feeling. As if the sacrificial victim is anointed in his extremis, and removed from the contagion of human contact which he pursued to its awesome finality, the taking of another’s life. But hope. Can it reach their son, from them.

— Unfortunately, it is not within the competence of this court to refer a witness for psychiatric examination. — And now the judge has allowed himself the indulgence of sarcasm, again an aside for those who may appreciate it.

Somebody stifles a rough laugh. It is out of order but probably what the judge expected he might get from the public.

— Therefore it is difficult to assess what the Defence submits, that the extent of stress this young woman was capable of imposing on her patient and devoted lover was great enough to culminate in his committing a crime in a state of criminal incapacity. There is evidence that Natalie had had other passing sexual adventures during the period in which she lived with the accused as his lover, and he had forgiven or at least tolerated these. Why then if he were not to have been reduced by her, finally, to a state where he was not responsible for his actions, would he not have forgiven, tolerated her betrayal once again?

We must turn now to the special circumstances of this particular sexual adventure. The court has learned from the accused himself that what he came upon that night after the party not only was his lover, Natalie, engaged in sexual intercourse with another man, that man was Carl Jespersen, a homosexual who had himself taken the accused as a lover and then discarded him, and who had repeatedly declared himself revulsed by women’s sexuality. The accused has not confided to the court what his emotions are towards his present and former lovers, what interpretation he puts on a role in the spectacle apparently inconceivable for him to believe Jespersen would ever force himself to perform. It is the Defence psychiatrist’s opinion that ‘When he (the accused) saw her in the sexual act with his former male lover, he felt himself emasculated by them both.’—

Silence is a great hand spread over the court.

All at once the people on the public benches are no longer strangers, their prurience is stifled as the laugh was, their presence is protective around the parents of this man.

— The court can accept that it was ‘not in his nature to kill’.

But what the accused saw in that act, and what he encountered in the deceased’s attitude next evening were surely not in the nature of human relationships in even the freest of sexual mores. Given these exceptional circumstances of what might otherwise have been nothing more than another regrettable incident in a relationship fraught with problems, the State psychiatrist submits that if the accused were to have acted in a state of diminished capacity, unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behaviour, he would have attacked the deceased then and there, on the night when he discovered the couple. The psychiatrist’s opinion is that the accused went to the house next evening with the conscious intention of vengeful jealousy built up during a day of solitary premeditation in the cottage. Asked whether she meant the accused intended to kill Jespersen, the psychiatrist’s reply was that she was not able to say to what extreme the accused’s intention might carry him.

This brings to the court’s attention the question of the gun kept at hand in the house: did the accused have in mind, in conscious intention, the availability of the gun, which he admits having seen being produced in the living-room the previous night?—

The judge looks up conversationally, but his audience is transfixed.

— The psychiatrist called by the Defence found the accused to have been precipitated into a state of dissociation from what he was doing when he was confronted with the sight of Jespersen on the evening of 19th January. He submits that when the deceased said ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink’ this attitude constituted a second blow like the one received the previous night. His professional opinion was that ‘A tremendous emotional blow is as forceful as any external blow to the head.’ Further, he states: ‘With the impact of these last words he (the accused) recalls Jespersen saying, he would have entered a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated … cumulative provocation reaching its climax in the subject’s total loss of control.’

This raised again the question of the nature and extent of cumulative provocation acceptable as the extreme stress submitted by the Defence as justification for a temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity. The psychiatrist testified that — I quote — the accused ‘is a man with a bisexual nature. That in itself is a source of personality conflict. He had suffered emotional distress when he. followed his homoerotic instincts and had a love affair which his partner, Jespersen, did not take seriously and broke off at whim. He overcame the unhappiness of the rejection and turned to the other and probably dominant side of his nature, a heterosexual alliance for which, again, he took on serious responsibility. Even more so, since the alliance was with an obviously neurotic personality with complex self-destructive tendencies for which, when crossed in what she saw as her right to pursue them, she punished him with denigration and mental aggression.’ The conclusion of this assessment, which I have already quoted earlier, was that when the accused saw her in the sexual act with his former lover, he felt himself emasculated by both.—

Claudia feels Khulu lift and let fall his arms. At her other side, Harald’s profile is Duncan’s, the order of resemblance reversed; confusion engulfs her. She is confronted with the face of a patient whom she referred for surgery to take place today; it’s a fragment of the medical record that is her life, blown across her mind. My assessors and I, what is the voice saying—

— My assessors and I, of course, have to examine the evidence of psychiatrists carefully and give it due weight. However, as the highest court of the land has said, their science is not an absolute but an empirical one. Psychiatrists rely on what they have been told by the accused, often without critically analyzing these statements to determine whether they may not be proffered as self-serving. My assessors and I are equally capable of interpreting the evidence as a whole, led before us, as to whether or not there was criminal responsibility. Albeit that the Defence psychiatrist is of the opinion that there was no criminal responsibility, and even though the State psychiatrist, if somewhat reluctantly, has made some concessions in terms of our law, we are entitled to come to our own conclusions. We find as a fact that the accused’s personal history of prolonged emotional stress is genuine; but is this enough?—

So confidently in control of their life, Claudia’s and his own. First they were ceded into the hands of Motsamai; now in the power of this man who asks, but is this enough? The power’s omnipotent. Only Duncan could answer.

— We have identified the decisive aspects of the case.

One: did premeditation of revenge occupy the accused during the day he spent alone in the cottage, and as a consequence did he go to the house intending to seek out Jespersen and cause him bodily harm?

Two: whether or not harmful intention was premeditated, when the accused picked up the gun and shot Jespersen, was he in a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated and there was total loss of control?

On the matter of Question One, my learned assessor, Mr Abrahamse, a member of the Bar, and I are of the opinion that there was no premeditation of vengeful bodily harm, this based on the absence of dissimulation in the accused’s evidence and the fact that, firstly, it is accepted that he had no weapon of any kind with him when he left the cottage; secondly, although the house gun was not kept locked away in security, merely in a drawer in a bedroom, it is reasonable to suppose that when the room had been tidied up after the party it would not have been left lying on the table. My learned assessor, Mr Conroy, an experienced senior magistrate, was of the minority opinion that there was premeditation, this based on the reasonable assumption that solitary self incarceration in the cottage strongly implied this.

In the matter of Question Two, the court has devoted much careful deliberation to the contrary elements revealed between the only witness to the crime itself available — that of the accused himself, and the fact of the body of the victim — and the various interpretations of his act as presented to the court. The accused has testified that he did not see the gun when he entered the living-room, and he could not say at what point he saw it. Yet he admits that he could and did pick it up. He says that he ‘didn’t make any decision’; but, nevertheless, he fired it.—

The lifted gaze accuses them, the mother and father and friend of the murderer, although the judge probably doesn’t even know where they are among the faces; they take that gaze upon themselves.

— There is some doubt as to whether or not he knew it was loaded. If he did not know — although it is reasonable to suppose he did, since at the party he could have seen this demonstrated — and he had to verify whether or not it was loaded by opening the chamber, the deceased surely would have had sufficient warning of the accused’s intent and could have made a move, jumped up to defend himself. The validity of the submission that one may verify that a gun is loaded or not, whether the safety catch is on or not, and then take aim accurately at a victim’s head, if one is not an experienced marksman and is in a state of inability to engage in purposeful conduct, which is one of the definitions of lack of criminal capacity, therefore also remains in some doubt. The accused has admitted that the gun, which he knew how to use, was nevertheless ‘the only one I’d ever touched’. Usage which is not habitual generally requires conscious attention in order to be performed, however simple the process may be.—

The protection closed in around them has been withdrawn; the company have become spectators again, impatiently bored with all this legal yes and no and maybe and nevertheless. The import carried in the judge’s next statement, carefully delivered without any of the histrionic ring that has sounded an alert in some of his other pronouncements, satisfies no expectations.

— Therefore it is the opinion of the assessors and myself that, although the crime was committed under extreme stress, it was a conscious act for which the accused bears criminal responsibility. —

Even Harald and Claudia, who have been balancing, in that intense concentration of theirs, the yes and no of convoluted discourse — O, if one could be sufficiently removed, safe enough from it to be bored — a moment of bewilderment passes between them before they translate the dry statement of reasoned opinion into the fallen hammer of verdict. Why go on, why is he going on, he’s already picked up his weapon to hand and struck with it, full in the breast. Criminal responsibility. Our son is not mad. Duncan do you hear, did you take it in?

But the man is going on. He taunts, he can’t leave alone what he has said, he has to do it again. Dangle hope.

— The court takes into full consideration certain mitigating factors, albeit that the accused has shown no remorse for his crime. Firstly, he did not carry any weapon when he went to the house. Secondly, he could not have known that the deceased would be lying on the very sofa where the sexual act had taken place before his eyes the previous night. Thirdly, the gun happened to be there, on the table. If it had not been there, the accused might have abused the deceased verbally, perhaps even punched him in the usual revenge of dishonoured lovers of one kind … or both.—

He seems now to abandon his text, to accuse the assembly and himself, the streets and suburbs and squatter camps outside the courts and the corridors, the mob of which he sees all as part, close up against the breached palace of justice. — But that is the tragedy of our present time, a tragedy repeated daily, nightly, in this city, in our country. Part of the furnishings in homes, carried in pockets along with car keys, even in the school-bags of children, constantly ready to hand in situations which lead to tragedy, the guns happen to be there.—

Khulu is jerking his head vehemently against self-restraint, but for Harald, the judiciary has had its little homily, yes. Does this have any bearing on what is going to be done with my son who, like everyone else, breathed violence along with cigarette smoke?

The judge takes command of himself.

— The gun was there. The accused had the volition to use it to deadly purpose.

The unanimous verdict of the court is that Duncan Peter Lindgard is found guilty, with extenuating circumstances, of the murder of Carl Jespersen.

I propose to adjourn the matter of sentence until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.—

The people have seen justice done. They are shamed, now, to be curious observers of the couple to whom something terrible has happened; they stand back, nudge each other out of the way to let Harald and Claudia and that black gay, that moffie—the witness, pass. Claudia’s eyes meet those of a stranger; he lowers his gaze.

An emotional shock has the force of a blow on the head. But this verdict is not a shock; it is the delivery of dread that has been held — only just — at bay for many weeks and has been drawing closer and closer for the days in this place, closer than the surrounding strangers; waiting to be brought down upon them, Harald and Claudia. In the movement of police, lawyers, clerks, gathering the documentation by which justice has been arrived, it is difficult to find Duncan. He’s not there? Duncan was never in this place, never. None of this could have happened to their son.

At ten o’clock in the morning the court rises for the judge’s entry. Papers glide one under the other; the sunlight from the eastern windows shines through the membrane of his prominent ears. He is an ikon to displace those to whom Harald has directed prayer in the past.

Apparently it is standard procedure for the Prosecutor and the Defence Counsel to joust briefly on the issue of sentence, as if it were not already determined on the papers under the judge’s hands lying half-open like mouths ready to speak what is held behind his lips locked at the corners. The Prosecutor earnestly reiterates what he has elicited from the accused in his cross examination; there can be no question of ambiguity when the facts of the case come out of the accused’s indictment of himself. — You remarked in judgment, Your Lordship, that he showed no remorse; now, further, a man who shows no remorse is also showing that whether or not he performed the act of murder consciously, it was the carrying out of an act that he would have wished to have come about. He has no regrets because the death of the man who spurned him as a lover and then was his woman’s lover is what he wanted and it is accomplished. The accused who does not defend himself is the individual who therefore accepts that his crime is his crime, there is no mitigation to be claimed for it. To expect mitigation of sentence further than the concession of extenuating circumstances the court has already granted, is to bring into question what example, what message, our courts of law would send to society with such mitigation. Your Lordship has referred to the climate of violence in our country as a cause of great concern. A crime arising out of the cohabitation of people like the accused and his fellow occupants, his mates, in a house where none of the acceptable standards of order, whether in sexual relations or the proper care of a weapon, was maintained — if such a crime is to be regarded leniently, lightly, what kind of dangerous tolerance will this indicate of what is threatening the security and decency in human relations on which our new dispensation in this country is based? Yes, the gun was there; the crime of vengeful jealousy with which it was committed is by no means excused by, but belongs along with the hijacks, rapes, robberies that arise out of the misuse of freedom by making your own rules. That’s where it all begins — defying all moral standards and claiming total permissiveness, as the accused and his friends have done, and which led to permit the murder of one of them, one of the bed-mates, by another — the accused. I don’t have to remind the court that justice must be done to society as well as to the individual accused when sentence is passed commensurate with the damage he has done in taking the life of an individual, and to society — he, a highly privileged young man, a professional to whom society has given all advantages — by taking part in the moral free-for-all that abuses and threatens that society.—

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 contain 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 fellow 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.

It occurs to Harald that whenever they leave the prison now it is as it was when they left him at school. The span of time ahead, unthinkable seven years or five years, is telescoped to something by which it can be understood.

He knows that there is the unanswered question in their regard on him every time they visit; needing a response. The judge stated it as a fact, not a question. ‘He has shown no remorse.’ How could they know, any of them, what they have a word for. How could they know what they are thinking, talking about. Harald and Claudia, my poor parents, do you want your little boy to come in tears to say I’m sorry? Will it all be mended, a window I smashed with a ball? Shall I be a civilized human being again, for the one, and will God forgive and cleanse me, for the other. Is that what they think it is, this thing, remorse.

He brought me a book when I was awaiting trial, I think it was when he was so angry, so horrified that he wanted to accuse, punish me, but there was something in it he didn’t, doesn’t, never can know. The passage about the one who did it and the one to whom it was done. ‘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.’

Writers are dangerous people. How is it that a writer knows these things? Only that this time it is the three of us, alone together. In the ‘human relationship’—love-making and all the rest — Carl acted, I suffered him, I acted, Natalie suffered me, and that night on the sofa they acted and I suffered them both. We belong to each other.

I’ve copied that quotation again and again, don’t know how many times, in the middle of the night from memory I’ve written it on a scrap of paper the way she used to scribble a line for a poem, I’ve stopped in the middle of a section, when I was concentrating on my plan, and had to write it out somewhere. He’s dead, and he and she and I share a secret that binds us forever together. You couldn’t put it better than that; he’s dead, I somehow took up the gun and shot him in the head. There’s another passage in that book; about the one who does it. ‘He has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’ When I found them like that, my deepest desire — what was it? If only I knew what it was I wanted, of what I saw was their betrayal or consummation of us three, and if because I couldn’t have whatever it was I wanted, my deepest desire was gratified when I shot my lover and her lover. He’s dead, I’m alive, rejoicing with all of them — my parents, Motsamai — that there’s no Death Penalty any more. The murderer has outlived the murdered. Try and tell this to my judges, the one in court and the ones in the townhouse. It cannot be told, only be lived, in this walled space made for it. What’s outside, what I can see from the Tantalus window when I stand on the bed — out there, after seven years (five, Motsamai promises), will it be put behind me, will the one who is dead and I not belong to each other still. I should ask an old lag that; we didn’t move in the circle of criminals, in the house and the cottage. So many things we didn’t know, never should have needed to know. The three of us, Carl, dead, Natalie and I alive, Nastasya my victim and, as Khulu says, Natalie my torturer, wherever she is, in what I’ve done we’re bound together, whether she ever knows it or not, whether or not what she has in her womb is another secret.

The CD player is stored at the townhouse with other things. No music in these nights between these days of my seven years. The narrow aperture of the window keeps surveillance while the Judas eye in the door is shut; what disciple of functional architecture thought up specification for that lozenge of a window which divides so satisfyingly into segments made by vertical bars. The night cut in five pieces.

No player yet there are passages I’m hearing over and over, the adagio movement from Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ and the allegretto of a Schubert impromptu. He and I used to go to concerts in that time, the L’Agulhas time. With him there was more than Brubeck and who was the other jazz man. The deceased had a collection of recordings, Penderecki and Stockhausen, too. Listening to music that is formed in your own head, is there without any agency of reproduction — how? how? — through the hours you begin to know what music is. It’s one of the ways — only one of the ways — in which order can be selected, put together, out of the original chaos. With her, I listened to this Beethoven and Schubert for my ears alone, through headphones; it’s a bit like that now. She didn’t want to listen; I see it wasn’t because she needed to be tutored in appreciation etc., by me. It was because she was in rebellion against the principle of order; in anything, everything, that’s why she never finished the poems.

There has to be a way.

Of course, if I were to ‘confess’ all this to Motsamai he’d get busy with grounds of remorse and maybe even succeed — he’s a wizard in his devotion to his clients — in getting an earlier remission than he’s conned me to count on. But then all this that I live would be taken away from me; I couldn’t endure, without it, this space made for it.

The Last Judgment of the Constitutional Court has declared the Death Penalty unconstitutional. The firm and gentle tone of the Judge President has the confidence of a man who while he is conveying the ruling arrived at after several months of weighing scrupulously the findings of a bench of independent thinkers, himself has been given grace. There is a serenity in justice.

If the decision had been for the State, once again, to have the right to take a life for a life, it would have been too late to decree that Duncan should be hanged one early morning in Pretoria. He was already secured by his sentence: seven years. Yet the news sets her visibly trembling; he takes her two hands to steady her; and himself. The ultimate sentence held off by a moratorium was the threat that it still existed; on the Statute Book, even Motsamai had said. And while it still existed it would always have been what, for their son’s act one Friday night, could have been exacted. So it is release, relief, a curious trace, like happiness; how strange that it should be possible to feel anything like this. Duncan is still where he is.

Harald and Claudia decided to go away. On holiday. It is awkward to admit this to Duncan, in the visitors’ room. He says, About time you took a break! How long is it?

But let’s avoid that; the last holiday was before, when there was a customary systole and diastole between work and reward. Many months have passed for him where he is and them outside.

To the Cape. — Didn’t you once go to L’Agulhas? Would it appeal to us, you think?—

— It’s the end of the continent — he says, in homage.

— Or maybe Hermanus. But we’d rather like to try somewhere new.—

Wherever it was that they did go, flew, took the car, the beckoning world was beautiful. He was in his cell and a wretched child covered his head with his arms as he slept in the streets of Cape Town beneath the eternal mountain that made you want to live, as it does, forever. What looked, from the perspective of a moving car, like the refuse dump of a city was a vast low surface of board, tin, plastic rags and people reduced to detritus under a sky gloriously feathered, a cosmic bird, cirrus gilded by light shining from billions of miles away. A splendid night shuddered thunder with lightning fleeing in all directions. The serene sea covered rotting ancient wrecks and present pollution alike with a sheen of lucent colour, and rested the breasts of gulls. You could have walked upon that water, no wonder Harald could believe it once happened.

Signals of life, from everything, in spité of everything. The plane’s shadow a great butterfly passing over green, and crops in ear, and lilac desert. From a window, valley lights at night fluttering to attract, attract. Claudia began to have the feeling that she and Harald were waiting for some signal, the signal that would move life on, take them out of the regression in which they had taken refuge, going through the motions, their echoing voices occupying what was emptied of meaning. She tried to think of this in practical terms: perhaps they should leave the townhouse complex as it really was already, void of their life there. Perhaps they should move house.

Could any team of professionals with their packing cases and vans make such a move; and wouldn’t it all, the stored possessions that were Duncan’s from that cottage along with everything else, be delivered, unloaded, surround Harald and her in the next habitation?

Motsamai made sure that the firm sent Duncan sections of their projects to design. He never saw the completed set of plans for which he was drawing certain vertical, horizontal and lateral projections, aspects from the North and South, East and West. But he thought sometimes how his own work was already achieved: the structure of this cell was his accomplishment, designed to the specifications of his life.

Harald and Claudia did not move. At the beginning of summer there was a call on the answerphone when Harald, as so often, came home to the townhouse before Claudia. The voice was at once familiar: the bass African accent and casual delivery of Khulu. How’re you folks doing? I’ve been meaning to come round. But you know how time goes, anyway I hear about you from Duncan.

Claudia did not want to return the call at that house. Harald understood: Baker might answer. He remembered the newspaper for which Khulu had said, in the talk he kept up when the three went to a café between sessions of the court, he did most of his reporting. Harald had his secretary call there several times but without success, and a message was left.

He/she. A summons on the security monitor, on a night when they were not expecting anyone. Claudia answered, this time. Khulu announced himself. When he reached their door, both were there to meet him, there was the keen sense of a pleasure deprived in not having sought him out months ago, themselves. His heavy arms went about each in turn. Animation filled the room, while Harald fetched drinks, and Khulu catted — Claudia, you got bread or something, some fruit, I’ve been out on a story, nothing in my stomach all day!—

Claudia had a young man for whom to put together a meal. She came back and forth with cold meat and cheese and chutney and bread, and Harald brought the fruit bowl. Khulu ate with inattentive zest while talking about the changes in ownership of newspapers with the acquisition of a group by blacks. He was proud of this; and sceptical about the advancement of his career that Claudia suggested it would mean for him; Harald lifted a hand in the gesture that came from his experience in matters of financial power, the rivalries which take place up there in board rooms when seats are vacated by one set of backsides and taken up by another. There was laughter at this uninhibited expression of understanding that the mood brought by this visitor made easy.

But Khulu was also a messenger. When he had pushed aside the plate of banana skins and turned in the chair with the beer glass in hand, he made his delivery.

— Duncan wants you to do something about the child. If it’s not his, it’s Carl’s. So Duncan—

Duncan has entered the room, the townhouse. The dog, sleeping beside Harald’s chair, might even get up to greet the empty doorway.

No-one speaks, and then Khulu takes a mouthful of beer. He shifts the bowl of fruit to make room for the glass. — So Duncan wants.—

He/she.

— What is it we could do.—

Harald remembers well — That girl won’t have anyone claim the child! What she said in court. It’s hers.—

— Duncan doesn’t agree.—

— What is it he wants — blood tests, Motsamai to start all that? And to what purpose? Prove the child is his and take it from the mother? Where to? To whom? If he succeeded, who’s going to take care of a child for seven years. Seven years old, five years perhaps, before he could.—

— I don’t think Duncan means that.—

— Then I don’t understand it at all. Where the whole idea comes from. Is he losing all sense of reality, shut away there. After all that’s happened to him, he’s gone through, to rake up this, drag another generation into it.—

— Harald, wait.—

— What can I say — I don’t think he means to take the kid from her. No way! Blood tests and all that. The kind of thing the Sunday press puts on the front page. You know Duncan is a thinker, he’s got his own idea about whatsit again, paternity. —

— Who knows whether the child is even born yet. Or whether there ever was a child. I’ve had patients with her kind of history who produce phantom pregnancies. Duncan may be distressing himself for nothing.—

— It’s here, it’s about a month old.—

Harald sits looking at Claudia until she says as if she already knows — What is it?—

— A boy.—

— So what do you think Duncan means. — Harald tries to force himself to think of this as a proposition to be put upon the table between the fruit bowl and the glass bleary with beer dregs. — Money?—

— Not so much that, but yes, babies need things, I suppose. Some sort of back-up for her, make sure she can take proper care of it.—

— We don’t even know where she is.—

— I know how to find her.—

Perhaps the girl is holed up somewhere with her baby, secret from the world, and she does not know that the men, Duncan and Khulu are after her; for Claudia, who has seen so many births, there was a moment of pure possession like that, for herself after giving birth, she had thought long forgotten. — Perhaps Duncan should leave her alone.—

The two men misunderstand Claudia; what they hear is embittered opposition to any money, back-up, contact, being provided for that girl and her doubtful progeny.

Khulu gently repeats the expression of Duncan’s will. — I know where to find her.—

In the family.

This is a matter between them, the three in the townhouse. They part that night with the intimacy of court days restored.

Khulu Dladla has his own knowledge that this couple to whom the fact that he’s black and gay doesn’t preclude his being, to them, like a son — well, they’re white, after all, and what they’re appalled by is that they might be expected to prove themselves as parents to their own son by taking in the kid, themselves. As if — with his people — this would need a second’s thought! Children belong, never mind any doubts about their origin, in the family.

There was no conception for a forty-seven-year-old. But there is a child.

It is provided for through the offices of Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai’s chambers; the one condition Harald and Claudia took courage to insist, with Duncan, was that arrangements should be made by Hamilton, and not in personal contact with them. Duncan doesn’t demur, let it be as they like, he smiles as if leaving his father, fellow reader, to choose books for him, and he doesn’t offer any expression of gratitude, either. Everything is suddenly simple between them; why? Harald wonders whether he has been seeing her, Natalie/Nastasya has her visiting days at the prison? Or she’s written letters, her poems. One can’t ask. But he’s been able to come to them, his parents, with anything at all, even this matter of the child. They’re there for him.

Perhaps in time — even five years is long — they’ll see the child; Hamilton is confident, as always: he’ll get round her just as he led her to condemn herself out of her own mouth under cross examination, he’ll arrange what he calls access. Get to know the small boy. Have him at the townhouse, watch him play with the dog.

And Duncan?

Duncan has been granted permission to work in the prison library as well as pursue his studies in his cell. It is not much of a library, in terms of the kind of books that he and Harald have a need to read; the works that are dangerous and indispensable, revealing to you what you are. It’s not much used. The long-term prisoners who occupy cells adjoining his are mostly men for whom life has been action not contemplation; in violence, his and theirs, is the escape from self. When you kill the other you are trying to kill the self that plagues your existence. Then only the brute remains to live on, caged: most of them are terrible, filled with mumbling hate, dangling fists clutched to strike again, such hands can’t take up these frail objects, binding and paper, that could offer them the only freedom there is, behind these walls.

Who on earth is it who decides what should and should not be suitable for criminals to read, presumably on the criterion that there shall be nothing to rouse the passions that have already raged and destroyed? Rehabilitation. Plenty of religious stuff; as if religion has never roused murderous passion, and is not doing so again, outside the walls. Self-improvement manuals that are seldom taken out: Teach Yourself Bookkeeping and Accountancy, systems for a life that knows no chaos. But among the paper-back stack of mysteries (why should it be considered of interest to inmates to read of fictitious killings when we’ve performed the real thing?) — among these broken open at the spine as if what was to be found in them was to be cracked like a coconut or prised like an oyster, there are some real books, God knows how they got there. Maybe when you’re let out, done your time, as we say in here, it’s the form to donate your books for someone who’s surely going to come after. I sometimes find something for myself. There’s a translation of the Odyssey with fishmoths that have given up the ghost between pages. I’ve never known this book, its exalted category along with the bible, more than at second-hand from quotations in other books; if Harald’s read it he somehow didn’t succeed in interesting me. The architecture of ancient Greece — yes of course, that was more my line as a student, and I have the usual stock of bits and pieces of mythology. Oedipus put out his eyes for his crime. That’s about all. Rut now there’s something that’s for me, that’s been waiting for me, in this place, in my time. Time to read and re-read it. ‘With that he trained a stabbing arrow on Antinous … / just lifting a gorgeous golden loving-cup in his hands,/just tilting the two-handled goblet back to his lips,/about to drain the wine — and slaughter the last thing/on the suitor’s mind: who could dream that one foe/in that crowd of feasters, however great his power,/could bring down death on him, and black doom?/But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat/and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—/and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp/as the shaft sank home.’ And there is Odysseus shouting at the other men around Penelope ‘You dogs! … /so cocksure that you … wooed my wife/behind my back while I was still alive!’

The moment when you put your hand out to do it — the man in the madhouse was right, I don’t remember that moment but I reconstruct it, I’ve had to; I’ve found out that you think it’s a discovery, it’s something that’s come to you that has never been known before. But it’s always been there, it’s been discovered again and again, forever. Again and again, what Odysseus did, and what Homer, whoever he was, knew. Violence is a repetition we don’t seem able to break; oh look at them, my brothers—Bra, they have the right to claim me, we crowd of feasters on our own carrion in this place made secure for us alone — I look at them when we’re in the yard for our exercise, and they tramp and they lope round and round, round and round. I haven’t come to the end of the book, I don’t know how Odysseus reconstructed what he did, what way he found for himself. Put out your eyes. Turn the gun on your own head.

Or throw away the gun in the garden. That was a choice made. Can you break the repetition just by not perpetrating violence on yourself. I have this life, in here. I didn’t give it for his. I’ll even get out of here with it, some year or other. The murderer has not been murdered. My luck, this was abolished in my time. But I have to find a way. Carl’s death and Natalie’s child, I think of one, then the other, then the one, then the other. They become one, for me. It does not matter whether or not anyone else will understand: Carl, Natalie/Nastasya and me, the three of us. I’ve had to find a way to bring death and life together.