The House Gun (12 page)

A
s you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people—privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate in retribution—dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social policies where these had been violated in the country's past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of that State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster—the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr Lindgard once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely, any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still had seemed to have nothing to do with them, with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror—they had been unable to think further, only abstractedly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors' room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who, in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation to God's forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.' The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts' foyer, of being one among the fathers of thieves and murderers was now confirmed. The instinct to go and worship in the cathedral among people from the streets, which had seemed a way of avoiding the sympathy of his suburban peers, had been the taking of his rightful place with those most bowed to misfortune. The truth of all this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety—that other form of segregation—could change their status. In its way, that status was definitive as the forced removals of the old regime; no chance of remaining where they had been, surviving in themselves
as they were
. Even money;
that could buy for them only the best lawyer available. It could buy Motsamai. Motsamai's extenuating circumstances stood between them—Duncan, Harald, Claudia—and the decision of another court, a court whose decision would not be made on any circumstances in mitigation of the act of an individual, but on the collective morality of a nation which is the substance of a constitution—the right of an individual to life, even if that individual has taken another's life, and whether the State has the right itself to become a murderer, taking its victim's life by the neck, hanged in the early morning in Pretoria.

Death Penalty.

Motsamai is confident it will be abolished. ‘Finished and done' (polylingual as he is, what was on his tongue and translated for their language preference was probably the more expressive Afrikaans-English slang, finished and
klaar
). But while the man killed on that sofa is under the ground, under the foundation of the townhouse and the prison, and Duncan is in a cell, it is on the Statute Book, it is the law's right, the State's right: to kill.

Just as it was the abstract larger question of a civilized nation's morality that was all that engaged Harald and Claudia when there was no question it could ever have any application to them and theirs, so this night the larger question had no place in the blinding immediacy: Duncan in a cell, awaiting the sentence to be passed down. They were two creatures caught in the headlights of catastrophe. Nothing between Duncan and the judge, passing sentence, but Motsamai and his confidence. The embrace of his confidence—wasn't it the expression of the man, rather than the lawyer, compassion that was on the Other Side, inner side, of his patronizing command, that shell of ego he had had to burnish to get where he was, granted as the best available for this case, among a choice of white Senior Counsel.

Neither could stop thinking about the repulsion they had felt, no escaping it, at the sight of, the situation of Duncan between two warders, this last time in the visitors' room, that place stripped bare of anything but confrontation. Prison, it was all confrontation,
all—perpetrator and jailer, perpetrator turned victim of jailer, son become betrayer of the love parents had given him, parents become betrayers of the covenant made with him. The distaste they had felt suddenly that time, no, these last few times, before him in the visitors' room. It was revulsion that had brought them together. Revulsion against their child, their son, their man—no matter what he has done—who was brought into being by an old, first passion of mating. The sorrow that it was the shameful degeneracy, sickness of this conspiracy of rejection that had revitalized the marriage brought a collapse into grief. He lay with his arms around her, her back and the length of her legs against him, their feet touching like hands, what she used to like to call the stowed fork-and-spoon position, and they were dumb. Impossible to say it: sentenced to death. It was a long time, lying like that. At last she felt that he had fallen asleep, his hand on her body twitched in submerged distress, like the legs of the dog when it dreamt it was fleeing. Harald doesn't pray any more. Suddenly this came to her; and was terrible. She wept, careful not to wake him, her mouth open in a gasp, tears running into it.

P
lan.

Duncan has a table, a T-square, an adjustable set-square, a scale rule, a circle template in the prison cell and while he is awaiting trial and sentence a month from now he draws a plan. Does he understand he may be going to die? Is this defiance—a plan, a future—because he understands that? Or is it that he has some crazed idea, inexpressible hope in despair, that he will walk out of that place back into his life. He will be free of what he has told, although he has told them, he killed a man. Time will reel backwards with the skitter of one of those tapes he and the girl must have played in bed at night—they were on the bamboo table with the journals and the notebook—and partying that Thursday will end no differently than it must have done many times.

A dead man, as Harald has said, is not present to receive grace; a dead man has no plan.

E
verything is changed. So it is not incongruous to Harald that this old building commanding one of the ridges that drop away North from the highveld city, red-faced as the imperialist fathers who had it constructed with wide-flanked entrance and wood-valanced verandahs, has changed character. It is the old Fever Hospital facade he's looking along as he approaches but it is no longer a place of isolation for those who might spread disease down there among the population; it is the seat of the Constitutional Court. It will house the antithesis of the confusion and disorientation of the fevered mind: it is to be the venue of the furthest extension of measured justice that exists anywhere, a court where any citizen may bring any law that affects him or her to be tested against individual rights as entrenched in the new Constitution. The Constitutional Court, the Last judgment, will be the final arbiter of human conduct down in the city, in the entire country. Its justice will be based on the morality of the State itself, land and shelter, freedom of expression, of movement, of labour—no doubt these will be the issues of some applications to the Court, but they are only components of the ultimate to which this kind
of court is avowed as no other tribunal can be: the right to life.
The right to life
: it's engraved on the founding document of the State, it is the declared national ethos; there, in the Constitution.

Health not sickness, life not death is the venue.

The first application the Court will hear, convened for the first time, is that of two men in the cells in Pretoria awaiting execution. They exist under the moratorium. They do not know when or if the moratorium will end; the Death Penalty is still on the Statute Book. Neither has committed a capital crime for any cause larger than himself, a means to a political objective; each is what is known as a common criminal and he has been convicted of murder by due process in a court of law. He is not contesting his guilt. He is contesting the right of the State to murder him, in turn. The submission will be that the Death Penalty is in contravention of the Constitution. The right to life.

Harald has read this much in the newspapers. He comes, as if to a clandestine rendez-vous, to the old Fever Hospital. It is an assignation for him; he goes quickly up the steps, in the foyer does not know which carpeted area to follow, the place must have been totally refurbished, it has governmental status of elegance, not a whiff of disinfectant left, a bank of lifts before the inlaid floor's jigsaw of coloured stone, the potted palms. The atmosphere is less like the approach to Court B17 than the preparation for business seminars he attends in the conference centres of chain hotels. Men and women, minor functionaries, cross and recross with the unseeing eyes cultivated by waiters who do not want to be summoned. But a member of boards has a presence that is like a garment that can't be discarded although he himself feels that it hangs on him hollowly; a young woman recognizes it and consents to turn her attention to indicate the correct level and hall.

There is fuss and self-important to-and-fro in the destination he had found and where he is obviously early. He's shunted from one unfamiliar place to another these days: this is a well-appointed submarine, low ceiling lit over an elliptical dais where empty official chairs are ranged high-backed either side of an imposing
presiding one. Behind the dais, stage curtains apparently disguise a private entrance. Facing all this is a well of polished panelling and tables with recording devices for scribes, and cordoned-off by a token wooden barrier (standard furnishings, he has learnt, of premises of the law) are rows of seats for the public who have come to hear final justice being done; or for other reasons, like himself.

The seats are empty but he is asked to move from the one he has chosen neither too near nor too far from the front because someone is dealing out ‘Reserved' cards along that row. The pillars that hold up the ceiling are to be avoided; he hesitates before making a second choice, and now it's as if he is in some sort of theatre and must be able to follow the performance unhindered. A functionary brings water carafes to the curve of table before the official chairs; a tested microphone gargles and shrieks; the functionaries give one another chummy orders in a mixture of English and Afrikaans … the mind wanders … so at this level of the civil service (and of warders who stand at either side of the prisoner in the visitors' room) it is still the preserve of these white men and women, the once chosen people, old men wheezing out their days as janitors, the younger men and women belonging to the last generation whose employment by the State when they left school was a sinecure of whiteness. Back and forth they hasten, in front and behind Harald; the young women all seem to be wearing a uniform by tacit consent, some type of outfit varied according to fancy and enhancement of sexual attraction. Black-and-white, like the court-room figures in the reproductions of Daumier lithographs he and Claudia picked up along the bookstalls in Paris one year, they should give them to Hamilton, the right addition to the ikons of legal prestige in that room with its own shiny expanse—the desk—and the resuscitating cabinet from which brandy is dinspensed with kindness at the right moment to a man drowning in what he has had revealed to him. Harald recalls himself; looking at his watch. And people are beginning to arrive and take up seats around him.

He does not know any of them, except to recognize one or two expressions from newspaper photographs or television debates—this is an audience come on principle, people who belong to human rights organizations or are politically involved in positions for or against issues such as the one about to be opened. He and his wife have never belonged in the public expression of private opinions, which he supposes is the transformation of opinions into convictions: here he is, among these men and women now. On his right there is suddenly the scent of lilies, a perfumed woman arranges herself with a polite glance of acknowledgment of a neighbour who is surely an ally of some kind, else why would he be present? She has long red hair of whose striking abundance she is aware, and keeps lifting it back from her nape with graceful gesture as she searches through a portfolio on her lap. On his other side a black man sits for a few minutes, alternately gazing down at crossed arms and lifting his head to look right and left, and when he gets up an elderly white man takes the seat and overflows it with girth and bulky clothing. Whether he is poor or whether the outsize jeans worn colourless over his knees and bulges, and the workman's checked shirt and scuffed leather waistcoat are the expression of a disregard for material things is something Harald, outside the milieu in which such a code of dress is significant, cannot know. He shifts a little, anyway, not to embarrass the man. This is how minutes pass; not to think, not to think why he, Harald, is here. He is intensely aware of the extraordinary presence he is, in his reason, unbeknown to all these people, for being among them.

He is alone as he never has been alone in his life.

And now they begin to file to the official chairs up there behind the shining arena, smiling and chattering softly to one another as they look for their allotted places—men and women who are to be the judges. Not all are judges in the sense of having been appointed to the bench in the ordinary courts, but all have the title for the purpose of this Court. It is impossible—because of the past, and even more because of the changes of the present—not to see
them first as an impression of their colours. A black woman with the high cheek-bones and determined mouth of one of her race who has succeeded against odds, a black man with the heavy-set head in thick shoulders of traditional dignity turned academic (only he—Hamilton—has ceased to appear on the inner retina, of the mind, as black; dependency on him has taken his persona out of perception by colour). There is a brisk white woman with a homely Irish name who could be one of the feminist business executives who begin to appear on boards; a pale Indian with level eyes and sardonic curve to the lips associated with a critical mind. An old white judge from the bench emanates distinction, a patient face that has heard everything there is to be told by people in trouble; another who looks boyish, enquiring raised eyebrows as he rearranges his microphone and carafe, but he must be middle-aged, Harald's contemporary (but Harald has no contemporaries now). Others take their seats without capturing attention, except for one, a swarthy man (Italian or Jew?) with a scarred grin, and eyes, one dark-brilliant, one blurred blind, from whom radiant vitality comes impudently since he is gesticulating with a stump in place of one arm. They all wear green robes with black sashes and red-and-black bands on the sleeves—a sort of judo outfit with frilly white bib, which must have been designed to distinguish this court from any other. From the divide in the curtains the Judge President himself appears last, and he only is a connection with a past life, someone whom Harald has met or rather been present with on the eclectic guest list of a foreign consulate's reception. He is a man with one of those rare faces—easy to forget they exist—which present no projection of ego to impose upon others, upon the world. He seems to be handsome, but perhaps he is not; it is the calm without solemnity that harmonizes his features into that impression. He looks directly out at the public in acknowledgment that he is one of them. He does not smile but his eyes behind their panes have that expression, and further, a compassion—but perhaps it's the distancing of the thick glasses that gives Harald the idea that this is there, and touches him.

In one way, this is a strangely abstract hearing. Themba Makwanyane and Mvuso Mchunu—these are the names of the murderers—are not present. They are in the death cells. The application has been made jointly by lawyers representing them, and associations called Lawyers For Human Rights, the Society For The Abolition Of The Death Penalty, and even the Government itself; a government challenging the laws of the country—a paradox arising out of the hangover of statutes from the old regime.

Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu—who are they? It doesn't matter to this tribunal, who they are, what they did, killers of four human beings; they are a test case for the most important moral tenet in human, existence.

That ancient edict. Thou shalt not kill.

There is only one individual present in the concentration under the low ceiling for whom the proceedings are not on this higher plane of abstract justice. Yet the eloquence of the arguments sometimes draws Harald onto the higher plane, the atmosphere is that of a lively debate, with the abolitionists' lawyers basing their contention on sections of the Constitution's Bill of Rights, which they quote (in the aura of lilies the young woman at his right scribbles down what he side-glances to read:
Section 9 guarantees the right to
life Section 10 protection of human dignity Section 11 outlaws cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
). The abolitionist Counsel's back, which is all that can be seen of him from the fifth row as he addresses the judges, sways with conviction as he gives his interpretation of Section 9: the first principle is the right not to be killed by the State. The retentionists' Counsel interprets the same section as the State's obligation to protect life by retaining the Death Penalty as the measure effective against violent crime that takes life. A letter from a member of the public is emotionally quoted: ‘the only way to cleanse our land is capital punishment'. The judges interrupt, cross question wittily, and expound their own views; the case for retention of the Death Penalty seems to come up against the unanswerable when the judge who has lost an arm and an eye by an agent of the previous regime's attempt to murder
him does not support an arm for an arm, an eye for an eye; does not express any wish to see the man hanged. Only the Judge President contains himself, reflectively, with perfect attention to all that is said, and sums up argument when this becomes too discursive. There is some clause in Section 33 which does allow for the limitation of constitutional rights—a questioning of the Last Judgment (she is scribbling again:
only to the extent that it is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on freedom and equality
). The abolitionists' Counsel cuts through the discretionary clauses discourse and argues that even if there is a ‘majoritarian' position in favour of retaining the Death Penalty this does not mean it necessarily is the right position: the Court is sharply reminded that the question faced by the Court is whether the Death Penalty is constitutional, not whether it is justified by popular demand.

The Court has risen for the lunch recess. Once the Judge President has slipped through the curtains an informality breaks out. Groups gather and block the way between the rows of public seats. One of the judges comes from wherever it is they are in retreat to take some document from a messenger, he smiles and lifts a hand to friends but when they make for him shakes his head and disappears : it is not proper for the judges to discuss the case with anyone. The scent of lilies sidles past along the row with a hasty apology, already mouthing across Harald to someone waiting for her, What a blood-thirsty bunch … People are asking whether there's anywhere in the building where one could get a cup of coffee, a handsome woman with an imperious head of white-streaked hair opens her picnic bag of mineral water and fruit for her companions and is amusedly rude to the official who tells her it is forbidden to eat or drink in court.

All this forms around Harald and eddies away.

They've gone in search of satisfying needs—toilets, food, drink—as at any intermission. Sitting on alone among emptied rows he is no longer disregarded; he is the focus of the shining arena, the vacated half-circle of official chairs up there identified
now with the characteristics of the men and women to whom they were allotted. He gets up, walks down the stairs instead of taking the lift, goes out into the unreality of sunlight and the contrapuntal voices of black men working on a hole where some installation, water or electricity, is exposed for repair. Sun and
main d'oeuvre
—that is, has been the climate of the city, the human temporal taken along as eternal with the eternal. They will be here forever digging and singing. For a few moments dazzled by the sun, easy to have the illusion, nothing has changed. Those names, Themba Makwanyane, Mvuso Mchunu, two black criminals, are in the cells; the young architect is in his firm's offices somewhere down there in the living city, drawing plans.