The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer Page B

group, colleagues who would have to form an attitude to what set her apart among them. There was only Queen, the pert beauty preoccupied with her own authority as sister-in-charge at the clinic, and in the private surgery, Mrs February—whose ancestors had been dubbed with the name of the month in which they had been bought in the slave market—sat at her receptionist’s desk with the mournful eyes of a traditional dignified guise of trouble borne, in lieu of the doctor herself taking this on. It was a delicate expression of empathy that needed no passage of clumsy words. At the clinic and in her surgery hours, the doctor was within an unchanged enclosure of her life, a safe place; people who are surrounded by encroaching danger may be precariously protected for a time in areas declared as such by those outside threat, some agency of mercy. However she had difficulty in retaining the personal interest in patients’ lives which she had always held as essential to the practice of healing. The first identification with another whose son is imprisoned soon disappears in the crowd of those who are in misfortune; once truly jostled, become one among them, there has to be a sense that if I had to listen to your trouble you would have to listen to mine.
    She packed up with a food parcel the clothes Harald had brought home, re-folding them.
    Why didn’t you bring pyjamas?
    Young men don’t wear them, don’t you remember? There weren’t any. Don’t you remember, from when he still lived at home?
    How would I know what he slept in?
    Didn’t you see him walking around in shorts, underpants, in the summer often coming to breakfast like that?
    Of course, and didn’t she put away the clothes that came our
of the wash, arrange their order in cupboards for the men in the family, the dutiful wife and mother expected, as well, of the doctor.
    I didn’t occupy my time entirely with underpants.
    Seems to me there must be a lot of things. Much that we didn’t remember. Don’t remember.
    I wish you’d say what you mean. It’s difficult enough … to talk, to know what we’re saying. I have the feeling you’re in some way suspicious of me. You’re trying to catch me out, get me to explain, because I’m his mother, I ought to know, I should know why.
    And I’m his father! I ought to know!
    They stayed up late as they could in order to shorten the intervening night before the visit to the prison. At random he put a cassette of a Woody Allen film into the video player. When the lugubrious face appeared, Claudia remarked that the cassette was Duncan’s, lent to them and not returned. Perhaps it was an attempt, pathetic or ironic, to assert that she remembered something, a loose end, between them and their son. They heard each other laugh at parts of the film; and then it was over, the light on the screen drew in upon itself, vanished into the succubus of darkness. In bed, they lay in that darkness. Harald put his arm over her back, round her waist, but did not take her breast in his hand; it, too, lay there, open. Harald and Claudia had not made love since the night the messenger came. It was not possible for them. It might have been good, it might have helped—after all, they had been able to laugh—but there was witness, from a prison cell, closing her body, making him impotent.
    He thought under cover of darkness he might tell her what he had read on the last page of the notebook. Under cover of darkness: the place to understand, for them to understand what Dostoevsky revealed of their son, and to their son, of himself. Claudia read medical journals, she probably had never read Dostoevsky, he did not reproach her for it, in his mind; she healed while he could ensure—‘insure’—as a compensation for pain and disaster, only money, but how to expect her to be able to interpret a passage
from the depths of a mind with whose workings she was