The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  A farewell is also a celebration of immigration as a human solution. No-one here brings to mind it’s not the first time. Giles Yelverton. Hein Straus. Mario Marini. Debby and Glen Horwitz. Top (nickname) Ivanovic. Sandy and Alison McLeod. Owen Williams. Danielle (née Le Sueur) and Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his daughter Julie. Generations have buried this category of theirs along with the grandfathers but all these are immigrants by descent. Only the lawyer Motsamai, among them, is the exception. He was here; he is here; a possession of self. Perhaps. Lawyer with the triumph of famous cases behind him, turned financier, what he has become must be what he wishes to be; his name remains in unchanged identity with where his life began and continues to be lived.

  The fêted couple are about to be immigrants. Sitting among the gathering Julie is seeing the couple as those—her father’s kind of people—who may move about the world welcome everywhere, as they please, while someone has to live disguised as a grease-monkey without a name.

  Her father appeared as they walked towards her car. They already had said their obligatory goodbyes. He halted her a moment with a staying gesture barely touching her shoulder. She turned to meet a face restored from childhood. —You’re all right?— The voice for her alone. And in the moment that would instantly seem as if it never happened, there was in her returning gaze, for him only, the understanding that she was asking the same: about him, her father, that there was between them this question to be shared, to be asked of him, his life, too.

  Chapter 8

  That Sunday ended. There never need be another; he should be convinced, now. Her mother lives in California; that introduction, if he thought it necessary, would take place sometime if she accompanied her husband to his casino investments back in this country. That would not add much; all there was to tell him, confess, had been shown before him today. In the car he had found for her, going home to her cottage, they were silent, needing rest. She was grateful he said nothing about the experience; not yet. She placed her palm on his thigh and he took a hand off the wheel and touched hers lightly, returning his hand to the business of driving.

  In her place—their place—she stood a moment almost giddily and looked at him, an assertion of her reality, before her. He was glancing about the small all-purpose room with its three chairs, table to eat off, bed to receive them, unmade from the morning, as if looking for somewhere to place himself.

  Absolutely stuffed with all that food. What about you? Something to drink? Tea?

  He lifted a hand—no, no. He let himself down spreadeagled on his back, on the bed. She followed his eyes round the room to discover what he was planning to say; then she went over and sat on the bed. And twisted her body to lean and kiss him, on the forehead and then, tentatively, on the mouth. She was at once heated, like a gross blush all over her body and face, by a fierce desire, which she was at pains to conceal, folding away her hands that urged to thrust down over the flat dark-haired belly that she knew under his pants.

  Interesting people there. They make a success.

  Those were the words he was looking for round the room. The wonderful desire drained from her instantly.

  They’d stamp on one another’s heads to make it.

  Chapter 9

  The document must have been lying on somebody’s desk, that weekend. Or maybe in the post office from where whatever mail he received was to be delivered in the name that was supposed to be his, care of the garage that was supposed to be his only address. She was to visualize this closed and deserted Sunday post office, uselessly, afterwards, a daymare in sunlight, a conjuring up of foreboding in the dark bed at night. To dignify the piece of paper as a ‘document’ was more than the brusque demand it made in the guise of citations from this law and that, this paragraph of that section, as promulgated on one date or another. It had come to the notice of the Department of Home Affairs that (his real name) was living at the above address under the alias (the name the grease-monkey answered to) in contravention of the termination of his permit of such-and-such a date to reside in the Republic. This was a criminal offence (paragraph, section of law) and he was therefore duly informed that he must depart within 14 days or face charges and deportation to his country of origin.

  These letters that come unstamped, Official Business. She has never received one; her income tax papers, a citizen’s routine fiscal matters, go to her family’s accountants. He came to the cottage still in his dirty overalls, carrying this—thing. The envelope had been raggedly torn—he knows what to expect from such missives. He had read the news and come just as he was from among the eviscerated cars and the amplified pop music in the garage. —Here it is.

  She had almost forgotten; the months that had passed since she bought the car he found for her, his coming home to her every evening, the night club jaunts with the friends from The Table, the weekends away in the veld, lying side by side in his silence, the excitement and following peace of love-making, nights and early mornings—these had lulled her. These (what were those lines that came back to her) postponed the future … leaving everything in its present state.

  She sat suddenly on their bed to read the thing over again. He stood in the room as if he were already the stranger ejected from it. And so she wept and flung herself at him and he had no reassurance for her in the arms that came about her. They were unsteady on their feet. She struggled free and drew up the piece of paper. She took him by the hand for them to sit and read it over again, together. But he sat beside her, lifted his shoulders and let them fall, did not follow the lines with her. He knows the form, the content, the phraseology; it is the form of the world’s communication with him. She looks for loopholes, for double meanings that might be deciphered to advantage, that he knows are all stopped up, are all unambiguous. Out. Get out. Out.

  Then she became angry. Who told them? How did they find out? After how long? How long? Two years—

  Two years and some months.

  Who? But who would do it, what for?

  Anyone. Someone who wants my job, maybe. Yes. Why not.

  Why not! What harm do you do anybody, what did you take away from anybody, that lousy job and a shed to live in!

  Julie. Somebody who’s here in his own place.

  And now his eyes were penetrating as searchlights seeking her out, his lips were drawn back in violent pain in place of that beautiful curved smile. Even this I’m wearing, this dirty … even whatyoucallit, a shed, a corner in the street to sleep in, that’s his, not mine. That’s how it is. Whatever I have is his.

  A gust of what was unknown between them blew them apart. In distress she wanted somehow to reach and grapple with him as he was borne away, as she was borne away.

  Why do you take it like this! What are you going to do about it! There must be something—protest, apply—this Home Affairs place, can’t you go to them right away, tomorrow morning—how can you just—

  Leave me, leave me: he knows that is what this girl is really saying; to her—of course—expulsion means she loses her lover, this bed will be empty, at least until—she’s free, secure and free, she finds another lover. To calm her—and himself: I go there. Nothing will be done. They’ll look up the other paper from nearly one year and a half. They know I was supposed to get out then.

  So you knew this would happen. Even after so long.

  I knew, yes. I thought perhaps, they lost the paper, maybe they have so many papers of people like me, they could forget me. That was my chance. That’s how it is. I could go there to them, but what for. It will be better if I do nothing, I didn’t get the letter, I’m not at the garage any more, I’m somewhere …

  Well they don’t know you’re here with me. You don’t live at that address, that’s something. I think they’ll know.

  That horrible man at the garage! He’s bad news, he’s not for you, he’s not even allowed to be in the country. What about your job? Even if no records are kept… you’d have to disappear from that as well …

  Disappear (she has given him the wo
rd he needs), yes.

  Again. Again! And again another name!

  He sees her turning her head this way and that, in the trap. That’s how it is.

  If he says that one more time! So how it has to be is not what he will do about this letter, this document passing a sentence on his life, but what we are going to do. She has friends, thank his gods and hers, anybody’s; her friends who solve among themselves all kinds of difficulties in their opposition to establishment officialdom. They have alternative solutions for the alternative society, and there is every proof that that society is the one to which he and she belong: that letter makes it clear. She abrogates any rights that are hers, until they are granted also to him. This means she will follow no obedience to truthfulness ingested at school, no rules promulgated in the Constitution, no policy of transparency as in the Board Rooms where the investment business code applies.

  Julie does not tell him this; only by pressing herself against him, he’s palpable, he hasn’t disappeared from her, and holding her mouth against his until it is opened and lets her in, to the live warmth and moisture of his being.

  He receives her, but cannot give himself. She understands: the shock, the letter finally come, followed him, tracked him down; for her, outrage, high on alarm, for him a numbing. Let’s go to the EL-AY. We have to talk about this.

  Ah no. No, Julie. Not now, tonight. Let us stay alone. Strangely, he began to take off the grease-darkened overalls as if he were shedding a skin, letting them fall to the floor and stepping slowly out of them. Perhaps he meant to get into bed, bed is the simplest offer of oblivion? But no.

  I want to take a bath.

  She heard the water gushing a long time. She heard it slapping against the sides of the tub as he moved about within it.

  She picked up the paper and sat with it in her hand. That first time; he asked to take a hot bath, she heard him there; when he came out holding the neatly-folded towel he was barefoot in his jeans and she saw his naked torso, the ripple of ribs under shining smooth skin, the dark nipples on the pad of muscle at either side of the design of soft-curled black hair.

  That’s how it is.

  Chapter 10

  They are to meet at The Table in his lunch break. That’s the arrangement; she would not come by at the garage for him to join her—if one did not know what was to be done, at least here was a procedure begun, that trail that led through her from the garage to the cottage must be deflected. Look for him somewhere else.

  She was there before him.

  It’s happened. See her face.

  The friends in the EL-AY Café also had been lulled by his presence become accepted in their haven; they received her with gazes of alarm and curiosity, darting suppositions. (It’s bust up. He’s walked out on her. She’s seen through her oriental prince and told him, enough. Her dear papa’s heard about the affair and cut off her allowance. What else?)

  So she had time to tell them, to discuss what had happened before he joined her. Their reactions duplicated hers when it came to surface manifestations; the others, the depths of fear and emotions, they hesitated to approach so precipitately—even the habit of intimate openness quails before situations not in the range of experience. Indignation went back and forth across the cappuccino. That bastard at the garage! That man! Must have been him, who else! You can’t tell me any of the fellows he works with would want to go near to report to the fuzz! What a shit!

  —Wait a moment.— The political theorist thinks before allowing himself to indulge in hasty accusations. —The garage owner would not be the one to report that kind of employee. If he did, he’d be reporting himself as hiring an illegal. That’s a criminal charge, you know, my Brothers.— His quick, hard laugh is not offensive—a correction of the limitations of his white friends’ awareness of the shifty workings of survival.

  —The first thing, make an application for the order to be reviewed. You don’t take it lying down.—

  —You go with him to a lawyer, not one of those divorce and property sharks, a civil rights lawyer, what about Legal Resources, they must know a hell of a lot about this kind of situation.—

  —No, no, you do go to a shark, and you pay him well— come on Julie, you can find the cash—

  David, who is house-sitting at present, has his time to offer her. —I rather think it’s a matter provided for in the Constitution. Maybe. Could he make the case of political asylum—maybe not … I’ll go with you to the law library—my cousin’s an advocate and he can do something useful for once, he’ll get us in. You need to know all the relevant stuff, the small print, ready to throw at Home Affairs, you need to trip them up somehow—

  Their poet laureate has slipped into his usual place, the cape of white hair tied back with a black ribbon today, catching up quietly, with swayings of the head, on what has happened to Julie’s find. —He must go underground. There is a world underground in this city, in all cities, the only place for those of us who can’t live, haven’t the means, not just money, the statutory means to conform to what others call the world. Underground. That darkness is the only freedom for him.—

  Disappear. Julie, of whom this elderly man is particularly fond, among the friends, the one whom he’s said he regards as his spiritual daughter—she has a clutching sense of his divining, affirming her dread. While she tries to listen to everyone at once with confidence in their alternative wisdom, she keeps erect in her chair looking out for her lover’s appearance among the habitués coming and going in the EL-AY Café. She returns waves of the hand to those her eye inadvertently catches; his black eyes at last meet hers, her unique creature emerging from the forest of others.

  Hi Abdu. Today they all get up from round The Table to receive him. Men and women, they embrace him, this side and that, in their natural way. It serves them better than words, now that the subject is there among them. All are around him, except the poet. He sits contemplating, saying to himself what no-one overhears, no doubt some quote from Yeats, Neruda, Lorca or Heaney, Shakespeare, that expresses the moment, the happening, better than anything said or done by The Table.

  The victim thanks them politely; his hand taken up in hers, he sits down to listen. To be questioned and to hear his own replies. There is not much he can tell other than they drew from him with their brotherly welcoming when she introduced him to The Table months ago; or that he chooses to tell them? Sometimes she has to repeat to him something that has been said, as his head has been turned away—what is he seeking in this phalanstery of wine- and coffee-bibbers? Ever since he walked in with that piece of paper yesterday, his demeanour, his consciousness, by which one human receives another, has been that of seeking, an alertness that discards distraction. She orders coffee for him as she sees him glance at his watch; he’s arrived only after half his lunch break is over. Was there any sign that anyone at the garage knows? No-one said anything? No clue?

  He drank his coffee in an unaccustomed way, spoke between gulps. —Nothing.—

  —And the boss. Nothing emanating from him?— The follower of Buddhism thought there would be sensitivity to a change in atmosphere, even if there was no action.

  She was interrupted—Look, man, can’t you catch on, Teresa, I told you it’s ridiculous to think the boss could turn himself in.—

  Julie took careful note, in full attention, of all advice about what these good friends who knew how to look after themselves suggested should be done. She constantly referred this to him. He kept quietly gesturing he had heard. Their support surrounded him; as if he were one of them. As he got up to leave in the persona of the grease-monkey going back to the garage, he said without rejection—I have done all these things before.— There it was: the first time he was ordered to quit the country, when his permit expired.

  She wanted to run after him but her place—it was to be left behind in the EL-AY Café. Ralph smiled at her, a victim for whom, when he told The Table he had AIDS, they could find no solution but the victim’s own bravado of laughter.

 
; When he came back to her from the garage that evening she was ironing a pair of the designer jeans he always wore even when he was living wretchedly in a shed. A towel was folded on the table they ate off, the jeans were spread upon it; she was pressing one hand over the other that held the iron, to emphasize a seam.

  He had never seen her at a domestic task of this nature. Although they choose to live in a converted outhouse instead of a beautiful home with shaded terraces and rooms for every private and public purpose, people like her have a black woman who comes to clean and wash and iron. Since he had moved in he had dropped his clothes into the basket provided, along with hers—she would put apart the overalls, stiff carapace made of the week’s working dirt, with a pinned note that they must be washed separately.

  She looked up at him from his garment and her eyes swelled with tears.

  So it had to come: the tears, sometime. He came over and put the iron aside from her hand and turned her towards him. It’s all right. He had to kiss her, this water of hers running salty into his mouth; all the fluids of her body that he tasted, her sweat, the juices of her sex, were there.

  Then they went to sit on the sagging concrete step at the cottage door, looking out into the haggard tangle of fir and jacaranda trees darkly stifled by bougainvillaea, that was her end of the old garden where, far behind them a main house stood. She got up at once to go back into the cottage and fetch a bottle of wine—if bed is the simplest offer for oblivion, then among the friends wine is the best way of gathering nerve to tackle problems. She pulled the cork with an abrupt tug and took a swig, glasses forgotten. Handed to him, he put the bottle down on the earth. She began to go over with him the suggestions made by those, her friends, accustomed to get round authority. Again he listened to what he had heard before. Very practical, now, this Julie. She would go with the man David to a law library and familiarize herself with the relevant statute. She would ask around—people had to be wary when they revealed certain connections—about the kind of lawyer who was prepared to handle unconventional ways of evading laws. There must be many, many people like himself—the two of them—in the shit. (She knows he doesn’t like to hear her using these words that everyone uses—really there must be the same sort of necessity in his own language but of course even if he wanted to relieve his feelings in this banal way she wouldn’t understand.) They also might as well make an appointment with Legal Resources, they’ll know about conventional steps to take, human rights fundis must be well up in such matters.