The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  How would her son be dealt with by the men of the family. The couple—what would happen to them. But she knew, she knew what would happen. Ibrahim would not take disgrace from anyone here, such edicts were bearings cast loose, their authority over sons lost in the alien authority of exile, emigration—that she knew.

  Her brother. If his Uncle Yaqub were told. And of course he would be informed, the senior and most important member of the family. And he was the only one she privately could have hoped might offer help for her son to stay instead of seeking another emigration. When Yaqub was informed; what would happen.

  She knew what would happen.

  Her son would leave somehow, for somewhere, lost to her in the world once again.

  No-one had been in the house. Only she. She had not heard—no—the woman, his wife, enter and go to the lean-to, she had been at prayer. It was only he, her son, whose presence or absence she was always aware of, coming or going. Her daughter Maryam did not know that her brother had come and gone during the afternoon, occupied a bedroom with his wife.

  What would happen to her, the mother, if she spoke to no-one of what she knew—no-one.

  Aoodhu billah. If she took the sin upon herself, as if she assumed the distorted visage of the beloved face only she knew was evident. Astaghfar allah. If he is disgraced, nothing will stop him. He will leave. She will lose him again. Any punishment, in sha allah, rather than that.

  When one of the men lightly remarks upon her son’s disappearance from the company of the men in the course of the afternoon, she responds before he could. —He needs rest.—

  She, Julie, was apprehensive about the family meal after sunset, what had she done to him; would he not—both of them not—be shamed to take part, he among the men, she among the women. But he returned from the mosque with his father, Ahmad, Daood, Amina’s husband Suliman and young Muhammad, and greeted her as if he had not seen her since morning.

  Chapter 27

  The fuzzy intoxication of being awake when you were used to being asleep and to be sleeping when you were meant to be awake wore off just as the internal clock resets itself after a few days in a country across a date-line. She rose in the cold for the pre-dawn meal and the calls of hunger and thirst were a clamour only by sunset. The transformation of time-scale was complete when she remembered: back there, at The Table, friends had weeks ago seen an old year out, getting drunk, stoned; Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his Danielle had started with champagne and oysters their old life over again on a new calendar. A New Year was yet to come, as time is measured here.

  I was taught time was divided by the birth of a child in a stable and the calculation B.C., A.D. that followed ever after the great event. That was time. And all the blacks had been brain-washed by missionaries and battered by settlers into co-option. So they believed it, too. Had to. Well I suppose my parents had some friends—I must have known a few other kids?—who were perhaps Jewish, but whatever rituals they had didn’t count for much with us and they came to Nigel’s Christmas and New Year bash anyway, if they were on the right social level. Muslims—we didn’t know any … but the Indian shopkeepers closed for what we said was the birthday of God’s son and the day we’d decided was a new year beginning—oh I know the cycles of the moon and the changes of season were mixed up in it, but this was the Christian cycle. The world’s just their world, to them, the Christian world.

  He was sitting in the lean-to’s only chair marking with a ballpoint passages in a copy of Newsweek he had picked up somewhere when he was last in the capital for an interview with some consular visa section. The pen kept making only grooves and he scratched it fiercely into the paper to get ink flowing. Paused; to regard her.

  World is their world. They own it. It’s run by computers, telecommunications—see about it here—the West, they own ninety-one percent of these. Where you come from—the whole Africa has only two percent, and it’s your country has the most of that. This one?—not enough even to make one figure! Desert. If you want to be in the world, to get what you call the Christian world to let you in is the only way.

  Canada. The end of Ramadan meant for him that without offence to his mother he could take up again his way to go about applications for Canada. Two letters of recommendation (To Whom It May Concern) based, probably calculatedly and correctly on an unknown’s marriage to a wife with all the right provenance and papers—the wealthy American citizen mother as well as the wealthy father, cited, this time—had turned up from California. Surprise, surprise; Julie handed them over. She would not have thought Beverly—her mother—would or could have found anyone to put his name to them. The casino stepfather apparently had connections among his gambling cronies, though who knew what their signatures were worth. Anyway, Ibrahim put the letters in the file he kept of documents—applications pending, applications refused—marked in the flow of Arabic script she admired.

  In another country it would be called up on a computer, not all these to keep.

  He thrust the file back into the canvas bag of his possessions. Canada—there were brothers, in the village sense of community, already established; Toronto, Calgary under glittering glass-splinter snow, these frozen places might crook a finger of acceptance to the desert, where sand was grit between the teeth.

  She had been allowed, presenting herself tentatively and ready to be turned away with the sisters’ usual exquisite politeness and a stare from Khadija sullenly stern in her abandonment as a wife, to take part in the cooking preparations for the feast of Eid al-fitr. For her, the end of Ramadan meant that the sisters and the children came to sit expectantly in the communal space of the house at the accustomed times for the exchange of English and Arabic.

  An afternoon after Ramadan his mother was sitting among the women. She did not speak. But she was there. The die from which Ibrahim’s face was cast. A statement to be read, if only one knew how to decipher it in what endured, a bronze of being beneath flesh drawn from its fine-boned muscular moorings down round the dark elegantly-pursed mouth, creased beneath the brows, invaded by the growth of wiry hairs on the chin. All Julie could make out, in this presence, was she had gained acceptance by the respect of observing the edict that she neither eat nor drink between sunrise and sunset for thirty days, even if she did not spend those days in prayer.

  Even had seduced the son again, now in his family home restored to him, in the forbidden days. Did the face of the mother conceal she knew that, as well. He’s absolved: ‘He needs rest.’

  This foreign woman gives it to him.

  Chapter 28

  Sometimes his mood—when he came into the room where she was among the women or in the lean-to amusing Khadija’s and Amina’s children with games unearthed from memories of Gulliver’s garden—showed that Canada was going well. Other days he would glare round at his sisters and desolate sister-in-law as if at a flock to be shooed away, or say to the children in the language he shared with them—goodbye, out, go!—play somewhere else!

  There would have been frustration; no news at the consulate, the failure of a promised contact to materialize. He and she did not talk much about these inevitabilities of waiting; there was an unspoken pact of feeling that this would be somehow a way of attracting bad luck, as if some force were hanging over them, eavesdropping, grinning, tantalizing, holding out closed fists—which one? which one?—enjoying a knowledge that the one reached out for contained: visa refused. Why raise her hopes. Why answer questions about what he was ready to resort to, to get them out of this place. Just do it. Whatever it might be. Any day he might find the elegant suitcase packed. In her hand one ticket this time. Week after week passing; the sight of his sister-in-law, the woman Khadija, so haughtily accusatory of the family who had produced her husband, incensed him. Her mannerism of suddenly covering her well-made-up face with her hands, her nervous tic of despair. What the hell was bloody Zayd doing at the fucking oil fields! (The expletives heard at the garage where his wife had picked him up came back to him in their language.) Y
es, that’s it. Fucking, he’s found another woman there, and my mother has to feed the grand wife from the capital he was so proud of, my father has to pay and send his children to school.

  Who would have thought they would still be here when the wind months came. The rih is blowing.

  He comes back from wherever it is the friends-of-friends take him with what they calculate is probably the right sum of her dollars to place in an opened hand, and there she is wrapped up with a robe round her head like any village woman in the street. She smiles an acknowledgment at Maryam: Wasn’t it good of your little sister to kit me out for the wind? She drew the covering over her mouth and nose to show him how well she had been protected from the cutting fury of flaying sand on the way to the ladies’ conversational tea at the house of Maryam’s employer, for which she had now agreed to modest payment.

  He was shouting at his sister, some of the words could be understood as a result of those tea-parties: who do you think you are what are you doing who walks out in the rih are you mad take that thing off her, and the gentle girl was swaying this way and that as if she were being slapped.

  He disappeared into the lean-to. Julie put her arms round the girl and rocked with her. Maryam struggled free and pulled the robe away from Julie, who was incantatory, apologizing for him, Sorry, sorry, sorry. But the girl comforted her in Arabic and then, correcting herself, in English, licking away a tear that had run down her cheek to her lip and chokingly laughing at herself: —He has many worry—he is too busy with hard things. I know that. It is not me. Ibrahim—he—is angry for him not for me.— The two with their arms again about each other sat on the sofa quietly as if Ibrahim’s wife were a sister.

  Of course he’s right about the wind; even with the entire outfit women and even men wore, just their eyes showing, venturing out in that wind was terrifying, exciting—something never experienced before, beyond imagining back where the most intense experience of this force of nature was the wind called Black South-Easter that slammed doors and kept you off the beaches on Cape Town holidays. This was the reality of the cosmic blasts issuing from mouths of angry gods symbolized in prophetic engravings. It’s not often, now, waiting for Canada or wherever it’s going to be—with him, that’s all that matters—she thinks of the childhood where she did have the room with the plush panda she had wandered to find in the wrong house, that Sunday; of the revamped servant’s quarters with gleaming bathroom, organic soap and bath oils, miniature kitchen with suitably modest freezer and microwave, weekly washwoman, wide ever-ready bed for whoever the latest lover might be: trappings of the coterie of the alternative to Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sunday lunches, The Table at the EL-AY Café—what was supposed to be the simple life. We were playing at reality; it was a doll’s house, the cottage; a game, the EL-AY Café.

  The wind to which everything and everyone in the village was submitted blew itself out after exactly the months she was told it would. Its time was over; Canada still in the balance, there were decisions to come from the final authority in Ottawa. Julie knew that he had other initiatives out for the possibility of other countries; but what countries would be left to try. It ceased to be a question: an unspoken statement, conclusive. (That’s it.) He was away more and more from the family house, driving the old car to the capital—an Uncle is not a stranger, a sister’s son cannot be denied time off like any employee—spending the evenings in the village or perhaps another village, with the friends who knew contacts to follow up. The father and other men of the family were also usually out in the evenings; Amina’s husband Suliman, Daood the coffee-maker, Ahmad who worked at the butchery, and even schoolboy Muhammad, his cheese delivery round concluded, homework overseen by the mother, disappeared to kick a football with other boys under the dim bat-circled street-lights. It was a quiet time in this house that reverberated with many lives; the small children in bed, the women waiting for the men. The sisters Maryam and Amina would be talking dreamily as they endlessly knotted a carpet—or was it the next carpet—on a handmade loom, not much more than two young trees stripped of bark and branches, crossed by rough beams. She sat with the women watching subtitled American soap operas, left carefully, not to disturb, as if along the row in a cinema, to read under the lamp he had provided for her in the lean-to. Sometimes Maryam came hesitantly after her, and settled with legs crossed under her garment on the floor beside the bed where she lounged. Maryam had made extraordinary progress; they could talk now, exchange ideas beyond phrase-book pleasantries; even confidences. Did Maryam want to marry? The police commissioner’s son: did she love him?

  The girl showed her clamped teeth, softly giggled, dropped her head back. —I don’t know any other one. Only my father, my brothers. He looks a nice man. He speaks well. And he is not fat—you know—I would not want a fat one.— They laughed together; the girl shuddered, as if in some imagined embrace. —I think I can love him, we’ll see.— She had anecdotes about and reflections on the other women. They all talked of Khadija, so annoying and yet so shaming in her hostile despair. Yes, a pain in the neck … but that was a colloquialism hard to explain to Maryam … —Poor Khadija. She was—what do you say—awful, oh awful before, when my brother Zayd was here with her, when they got married and he brought her from her parents, she did not like our house, she was the one who said he must go to the oil fields for money to buy a house for her. Now she is—more awful— because she is so unhappy. She looks at you like this, she hates because she is jealous. You have your husband, your husband will take you to a good country, you have money. Poor Khadija. In this house no person likes her. And my brother … ? Does he still want her. We don’t know. If he doesn’t come back?—

  —But the children are lovely. Your father and mother like having the children with them.—

  The girl was silent for a while, considering the threshold between gossip and causing offence. She opened her pretty face to Ibrahim’s wife, the half-known, half-mysterious, about to tell something. —The others, they wonder why you do not get a baby. Then perhaps you will first marry here, our way. They look at you. We talk about it. And now—I must say to you … My mother has asked. She asks me.—

  It was understood: Maryam has been told by the mother to inform me that she expects me to produce a child.

  It must be passed off lightly. —There are plenty of grand-children, Khadija’s, Amina’s just had another, now you will have babies too.—

  —My mother thinks of a child from Ibrahim.—

  She glides out of contact with his back, out of the bed, awake very early. Perhaps it’s a new habit left over from the hours of Ramadan. She puts on jeans and a shirt over bare breasts, picks up sandals, slips out of the house with them in her hand. He’s always saying, as if drily repeating an adage, you can only live in the early morning in this place, his home, but he never wakes to do so—during the ritual rising before dawn one of the brothers had to come and thump on the lean-to door. She squats beside the empty blue urn to wriggle her toes into the sandals. It is true that the air is a pure element to walk out into, as different from the element of midday as it is to immerse oneself, move from dry land to water. The rih has sandpapered the shapes of habitations, the sky; there is the stillness of perfect clarity. She takes a walk, just down the street, accompanied for a few minutes by one of those cowed dogs who know they are despised in this village. Although she has not threatened it, it turns from her and runs away. She has come to the sudden end of the street: there is the desert. Its immensity has put a stop to the houses, the people: go no farther with your belching cars, your bleary lights in the majesty of darkness, your street vendors and broadcast babble; go no further in your aspirations.

  There was a clump of masonry a few yards out into the sand, the remains of something that had been built and fallen down, there, interred. She began to make for it and there was yet another element entered; the chill of the desert, night-cooled sand sifting through the straps of the sandals to lave her feet. She sat on the broken remnant of wall and
looked— if it can be said the eyes are looking at no fixed object, no horizon to be made out. The sands are immobile. She tried to think it was like gazing out of the window of a plane into space, but then there is always a wisp of cloud that comes across and creates scale. After a while there was an object— objects—which quickly drew into focus, black marks, spots before the eyes?—and as they grew became a woman enveloped in black herding a small straggle of goats. She came only near enough into vision for a staff she was wielding to be made out, taking her goats in another direction. In search of pasture. Here? This space undisturbed by growth, even while you lift and place your feet it obliterates where they fall and covers their interruption as they pass on. The spots before the eyes were gone. She suddenly thought of a glass of water, wanted it. And the need was strange. When you thirst, in the sands, water takes on a new meaning: it’s an element that has no place. She sat a while, hadn’t put on her watch, and then walked back to where the street began, with the feeling of being seen off, although there was nobody. The street was coming to life. The electronic call to prayer wound out from the direction of the mosque and from one of the houses there was the sprightly beguiling voice of a radio commercial. The vendor of fritters was coming towards her and she found, as she hoped, some coins in her jeans and bought a few, pleasingly warm in their wisp of paper, to her hand, as the cool of the sand had been to her feet.

  What is this.

  He gestured at the sight of her, up and dressed. He lay flushed with sleep under his dark-honey-coloured skin, black shining eyes shadowed in blue hollows, melancholy or erotic. Here I am.

  Here to come back to from a desert just on the doorstep.

  Out to buy fritters. Look, still hot. She waved the fragrant disks at him.