The House Gun Read Online Free PDF

room, the cells will be like whatever it is to which the prisoner went down under the well of the court: unknown. There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark.

    You can’t sleep, either.
    Beside her, he doesn’t answer. But she hears from his breathing—it does not have the familiar rhythm—that Harald is not asleep. In the dark, his attention is too concentrated to respond. That is all. He, too, has an inviolable privacy: he is praying. Harald is what is known as a great reader, which means a searcher after something that is ambitiously called the truth; both conditional concepts he would be the first, amusedly, to concede. He has tried, over years, through different formulations he has come upon, to explain prayer to her in a way that would be understandable to someone without religious faith, and the nearest he has come to this was to offer Simone Weil’s definition of prayer as a heightened form of intelligent concentration. When she questioned the proviso ‘intelligent’—what else could concentration be?—he satisfied her uncertainty by pointing out that there exists the possibility of a bug-eyed concentration on something trivial, which does not imply intelligence in the religious and philosophical sense. Prayer as a form of intelligent concentration is secularized in a way Claudia has had to accept. She has done this by separating the intelligent concentration from to whom or what it is addressed; then it is not a communication with a supposedly existing God, but a heightened means of communicating with one’s own resources in solution of guidance through fears, failures and sorrows.
    Harald is praying. His prayer enters the enactment of what will take place tomorrow. She lies in the dark beside him. What is he praying for? Is he praying that their son did not do what he is accused of? If Harald needs to pray for this, does that mean he believes what he cannot say, that his son killed a man?

T hey got up earlier than they would do routinely on a working day. There was time to fill before the opening hours of admittance. They passed pages of the newspaper back and forth between them, reading the continuation of crises whose earlier episodes they had been watching when the messenger came. For him, the photograph of a child clinging to the body of its dead mother and the report of a night of mortar fire sending nameless people randomly to the shelter of broken walls and collapsing cellars was suddenly part of his own life no longer outside but within the parameters of disaster. The news was his news. For her, these events were removed, even farther than they had been by distance, further than they had been in relevance to her life, by the message that had interrupted them: private disaster means to drop out of the rest of the world.
    He went and hung about in the small garden allotted, walled and maintained, within the landscaping of the townhouse complex; the intricately paved path under the Strelitzias was covered in a few steps, back and forth. Nowhere to go. Where he stood, the angle of the sun struck into flame orange and blue wings of blooms perched like birds. She was in the kitchen, occupying herself
with something. When it was time, she appeared with a plastic bowl covered with tinfoil which she placed on the floor of the passenger seat. While he drove she steadied the bowl between her sandalled feet.
    I suppose they’ll allow this.
    He rocked his head uncertainly. Awaiting trial, maybe.
    It’s just a salad and some cheese.
    Of course. Women, only women, have this sort of resource. They think of how to ameliorate. He was subliminally aware of tenderness and scorn, not for her so much as for them all, poor things; to be envious of.
    At that place, the prison, to which they were inescapably headed, they were received with the kind of courtesy