When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?
Harald’s dependence on books became exactly that, in the pathological sense: the substance of writers’ imaginative explanations of human mystery made it possible for him, reading late into the night, to get up in the morning and present himself to the Board Room. He turned to old books, re-read them; the mise en scène of their time would remove him from the present in which his son was awaiting trial for murder. But like his son, he came upon his own passages, to be omnipresent in him if not to be copied out alongside the others in the notebook locked up in his office. “‘ … the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in’ slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’
‘Deepest desire?’
‘Deepest desire.’
‘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.’”
Thomas Mann’s Naphta spoke to Harald in the silences that accompanied him everywhere: the accusatory silences, protectively hostile, between him and his wife; the silences he occupied even while he drew attention to anomalies in decisions being considered at business meetings or discussed the effect of new fiscal policies on the financing of mortgage bonds; susurration in the mind like a singing in the ears. The off-hand manner of the girl, at the lawyer’s chambers, when Motsamai said, You were afraid of him; and then — almost a boast — He was afraid of me. Afraid of each other? — in what is fearful, surely there is always one who menaces and one who fears. How can menace be equalled? In deadlock; and that is exactly what it will be, deadly; so if it had been Natalie/ Nastasya his son had killed there would have been an answer: they belong to each other. The reverse side of the conception of sexual love that romantically defines it as the blissful state of union, to which that good old-style marriage ceremony gives God’s blessing as one flesh. But he didn’t harm her; it was the man who lay, shot in the head, on the sofa, and it was known to the friends, to the lawyer, apparently to everyone, that he was not the first or the only other man she’d lain back on a sofa for, any one of them could have served as victim of the lover with whom she belonged in the intimacy of menace. There were times when Harald had the impulse to seek out the girl again, but Motsamai, who knew where to find her, discouraged this.
— I can’t afford to get her back up in any way, y’know what I mean, Harald, she feels that you and your wife blame her—
— How could we blame her. He did what he did.—
— Because you must blame someone. Your son in trouble. It’s human nature, nê? Because I must blame someone! His Counsel must prove circumstances that are causal, that will spread the guilt so that the burden of it rests on others who will never be arraigned.—
In the surf of silence that is with him, here in the familiar room where innocence and guilt are annotated by paper slips in tomes — this chamber and the prison visitors’ room are extensions of his townhouse now — Harald knows: us. On us. Harald and Claudia, who made him: the birds and the bees, don’t steal another’s toy, never read other people’s letters, thou shalt not kill.
— I have a very special kind of approach to her. Oh yes. Ah-hêh. — Motsamai’s lips struggle with something like amusement and self-approbation. — With women, you know; they’re very shrewd. And she, she turns on the charm — like a tap! — when she feels she’s being cornered. I have to coax her, without her realizing it, to condemn herself while she thinks she’s telling me about him. You have to know how to deal with such women. One moment they’re poor little victims, the next they’re showing off how they can dominate anyone and any situation. The weaker sex, they give us lawyers a lot of trouble. I can tell you.—
Harald’s distaste for the assumption that he will share, as an aside casually confidential among males, a patronizing generalization about women, is something he has to dismiss. It doesn’t matter, now, what this man thinks about anything except the case he says he is defending. Prejudices seem unimportant. Duncan was taught not to be prejudiced against blacks, Jews, Indians, Afrikaners, believers, non-believers, all the easy sins that presented themselves in the country of his birth.
— What did she tell you.—
— Don’t take this too seriously — from her. She says he is a spoilt brat. Her words. A spoilt brat. She also uses big words, nê: ‘over-protected’, so that he’s not used to any opposition, anything that threatens his will, the way he thinks things ought to go. The rules are his rules — I questioned this, I suggested that the kind of set-up these young people have has no rules except perhaps the most basic ones, you know, who has the right to take the beer out of the fridge — and of course they had the black man Petrus Ntuli to do the dirty work for them. No, she says, his rules were made for himself, it didn’t mean they were the kind of conventional rules someone like me, a lawyer, would think of. Then what were they? Well, they were about who went with whom, and so on. Sex, I gather; but also friendship, she insisted, the set living on that property seem to have complicated friendships, what you’d call loyalties. He ‘went along’ with the way everyone lived on the property, he thought this coincided with his ideas, his rules, if you prefer, but at the same time he was the ‘spoilt brat’ who couldn’t tolerate it when this style — which he’d taken on for his own, mind you — came into conflict with the other rules he’d freed himself from. From the older generation. Yours. She says these were still there in him although he believed they were not. She said something: he’s in prison now, but he was never free. And of course she means she’s free.—
— That doesn’t say much of what happened between them. From what you tell me, you’d think she had nothing to do with the couple there on the sofa.—
— You’re right. You’re right! She somehow distances herself, that is so. Ah-hêh. And she seems to have, well, no feeling for the man who died as a consequence of her act with him that night. She doesn’t show any particular signs of sorrow … for this terrible thing. Which of course is very good, excellent for my case. When I cross examine her. She could have been the one to die. Why not? She doesn’t even consider it. Why not? It takes two, nê? To get going … Yet she shows no remorse that she was at least half the cause of the man’s death, if we grant that he was well aware that he was busy with his friend’s girl. It’s difficult to understand her detachment. As if she’s sure it wouldn’t have been her. I’m aware there are things I won’t get out of her, perhaps — not even with my means.—
And he has a flashed laugh in appreciation of that skill, at once returning to the seriousness the face of the father, fixed on him, may trust.
To recount what passed at a meeting like this with the lawyer means that Harald, who is informing her, and Claudia, who is the listener, both must first tell themselves again, as they must many times, every day, that Duncan has killed someone. Accept that. The man lay in the mortuary, there was a post-mortem which confirmed death by a bullet in the head, and he has now been buried at a funeral arranged by the friends with whom he shared the house; his body was not flown back to Norway, the man Duncan killed is still here, under Duncan’s home ground.