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.