The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  She sat up startled and confronted him. Your father works for him.

  My father works for what makes him respectable. Your rice field. My father isn’t let into the Big Business, my father is the poor devil, may I be forgiven to speak like that, who fills in the right papers to sell rice, only rice, and gets a cash handout every few months. So he uses my father’s honest name.

  And now she confronted herself. Why should I be so shocked at this story; how many lunch guests at Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sundays are involved in deals that are not revealed, and if known are not talked about along with the price of Futures—not arms deals; but why not? Perhaps even those, passing by remote control through the sale of diamonds in Angola.

  If we had a concession it wouldn’t have anything to do with all that. Mr Aboulkanim. Just growing rice.

  He rolled away from her, rose, and changed his shirt, took from the canvas bag his folder of papers.

  I’ve got a meeting tonight with someone. We’ll see if he turns up.

  He came to where she sat flushed with the heat of the day, dangling her legs from the iron bar of the bed, shook his head over her, giving her the smile, that treasure so often withheld.

  She had not shown him the photograph, the slippery husks of rice sifting through her fingers. Until it faded it would be proof that the place exists; could have been attained.

  Chapter 36

  From the canvas bag standing ready, that carried his life from country to country, he had taken the letters sent by the woman in California.

  He said nothing to her; she had been completely dismissive of her mother’s likelihood of knowing anyone whose signature could be of use, anywhere, in a situation remote as his. But more than that: his hopes had been raised so often—the thought of this brought that confusion of resentment and shame that was new to him, a result of coming back to this place. He could not face her philosophical encouragement, real or assumed, her patience, real, or a cover for the adventure soon to become another to entertain back round The Table; the beautiful suitcase she didn’t value stood there, ready for her.

  No more news. He would say nothing to her, nothing at all, of the progress he was making, this time, this one time, and she knew so little about the delicacy of such business, she was too ignorant to be able to read the signs. Taking her to a consulate or embassy for personal questioning indicated nothing to her. Better that way. When—if—no!— when, this time, he would have something to say to her, it would be: news.

  And there was something else. There was an aspect to the triumph of his refusal to grasp at the opportunity offered by an Uncle Yaqub other young men stagnating in the village would give anything (of their nothing, poor devils like himself) to have, an aspect he had hardly known himself when the great decision—the best moment of his manhood so far— had been made by him: say no. Even if this girl had failed in the purpose he must not forget (in any tangle of emotion about her) he had counted on her as a source of Permanent Residence in her country, she had somehow in the meantime they happened to be living through brought about in him also an interim of meantime brooding contemplation, moving into thoughts of a kind he had never had before. When he had said, from the very depths of himself: no; it was also no to abandoning the man she had fallen in love with (as they say); no to what would have determined for sure that the adventure would be over, it could not become that of the wife of a future Uncle Yaqub. He would have been left in this place and married off and fathered more sons who could not get out.

  He came from the capital that day and as he parked Uncle Yaqub’s old car at the gate saw women coming along the street. She—Julie—with Amina and infant, Maryam and the little girl and—he had to look again—Khadija, they were coming from the market, female pack-horses loaded with plastic carriers from which green stalks and leaves overflowed. Onions or potatoes burst out of one, and gathering them was a game between Julie, the child and Khadija—apparently madam who kept to her own purdah of superiority now would venture out with the other women if Julie were one of them.

  He waited in the car. What kind of life. For her. It presented itself in its shame, approaching him. The child pointed him out, broke away from the women and rushed up to demonstrate his presence as if his arrival were some special occasion.

  It was.

  He greeted and exchanged a few words with his mother where she sat on her sofa in the communal room while Julie and the other women chattered over unpacking the market shopping in the all-purpose kitchen. She waved as she passed through to the lean-to; she would not disturb him and his mother.

  He came to her. She was dowsing face, hair and hands in the basin of cool water she kept supplied for them, placed on the chair she was kneeling before.

  So hot! She turned and looked up, a streaming smile, as if with tears.

  He opened his hand. Between finger and thumb were stamped papers round two passports.

  What?

  She stood up, wildly shaking wet hands. What?

  Visas. Entry permits. The United States of America.

  All in one movement he threw the documents onto the bed, overpowered her in a crushing embrace, a yell of triumph that brought their mouths together through water trickling from her hair.

  Chapter 37

  I am going to America.

  Told them, hadn’t he.

  So it should not have amazed them that he now had the authority stamped in his passport and his wife’s. There were family embraces of congratulation implicitly apologizing for having doubted if not disbelieved him. Only Khadija referred to that—You were just boasting then, weren’t you.— He did not take the jibe kindly; Julie saw this in his face but did not understand what had been said.

  Others in the family could not rejoice. Maryam cried: Julie would miss her wedding. He embraced his father; his mother. For forgiveness, for their blessing, once again. When he came home with his foreign wife his mother had allowed tears to mark the cast of face she had bequeathed to him, now she allowed no emotion to change the sculpture of years and the discipline of prayer. Or perhaps features and flesh could not express what she experienced in this departure; yet again. Only she, and her son, could know what that was. He said to her under the voices of others, I will send for you. To come; to visit us. It was as well, he knew, that she seemed not to hear.

  Chapter 38

  The visas in his hand.

  Still a number of practical details to attend to. He must go back to the capital, present his passport to his own government’s authorities, fill in forms pertaining to his emigration. He must return to collect the passport when behind the files and the computer screens whatever the process was has been completed. The airline would not accept a booking until both passports and visas were brought for scrutiny; and of course once this had been done, tickets could not be issued without money to pay for them.

  They sat on the iron bed in the lean-to reviewing their resources. She had a few dollar traveller’s cheques left but these would have to be kept aside to provide for immediate needs on arrival. His final hand-out pay from his Uncle, if they managed to leave, as he was determined to, within not more than two weeks, must go to Maryam as a wedding gift; her brother could not do less.

  Your father.

  She stared in alarm.

  Just say the word.

  No. No, no.

  Your father. He can pay for the tickets there and have them sent to you. That is the way. We will pay back.

  I can’t.

  Again.

  He had to fix her with his mother’s eyes while he kept control of himself, kept his voice soft and reasoning, held down, as he had had to do countless times in immigration offices, his frustration, and swallow the reflux of evidence that privilege can never be brought to understanding of reality, of what matters, the dignity of survival against principles.

  How to make him understand: her voice sharpened.

  You wouldn’t ask your Uncle Yaqub, would you!

  I asked. He said he would not
help me to run away again. He enjoyed himself.

  She put her head on his shoulder and buried her face in his neck. And he had not told her of this, the latest refusal. He had spared her.

  Back where she came from she had been the one in charge, the one with status; here, in what was his home, his place, ineradicable birthmark that defined in him that place’s ways of going about things, he had done—and only he could do—what was necessary. Alone with her in the lean-to now, he talked more than he had ever talked, taking her step by step out of her ignorance. The brother-in-law of a cousin had been in the United States successfully (that means legally) for six years. The family had lost touch with the man but through the months of asking everyone who might have heard where he was, in the days of sitting it out in coffee stalls, nights in the backroom bars in the streets where she had seen the bloated body of a dead sheep, he had been slowly gathering the information he was after. He had been able to get in touch with this cousin’s brother-in-law. And this one, somehow, Al-Hamdu lillah (the usage of home came unnoticed to his tongue as The Table would exclaim ‘Thank Christ’ when some secular dispensation could be acknowledged only through a deity), had done everything he could, and more, to offer a start for them at the other end—America. America. He was janitor in a large apartment block— she’d been to the States, she’d know how they are twenty, forty storeys, plenty of people living there—as janitor or caretaker or whatever he was called, he had a place to live, an apartment down at the bottom—

  Yes, she had been there, to America, she had seen how some people lived in the apartment buildings of the affluent.

  —In the basement.

  The cousin’s brother-in-law knew a lot of people who had found work to get started with, and knew how from that base you could move up towards the kind of position you wanted, so long as you had education where you came from and could learn to speak the language well, learn the skills. Night college courses, schools of technology, advanced computer training, computer science—that’s it! This man had all the information, addresses of institutions, foundations, openings, opportunities. Chances.

  America. To him, beside her, it was a single concept: but America, its vastnesses, so many Americas, from the casinos in California to Idaho (where she had skied) to New York (where she frequented museums and theatres), Charlottesville (where one of her lovers came from, she remembered), to Seattle, to Florida …

  Where is he, in America? What city would we go to?

  Chicago. He’s in Chicago. And his brother and a friend like a brother are in Detroit, there’s work there. For a start, that’s all right. They say they could find something for me. We might go to Detroit. You been there, you know it?

  Her upper and lower lips are drawn, mum, into her closed mouth; her head moves as if she is searching.

  He watches: ah yes, thinking back to another adventure.

  She never was in Detroit but she knows, remembers, the other kind of distances in the vastness of America. From the houses of Sutton Place with their doormen attired as royal flunkeys (Daddy Summers had sent her to be received by his friends at an address) to the slums of Chicago and New York where a worn old man or blowzy woman sits on the broken doorstep of a decaying building where emigrants ‘of colour’ find lodging, a bed-space, along with the black American poor, born down-on-their-luck.

  For the first couple of weeks Ismail says we can stay with them, they’ll make room for us in their place, Chicago. They have this janitor’s apartment—I told you. They must be very nice, wonderful people—don’t know us but of course we are family.

  And then.

  He rose, away from her, and began to walk about the room; so confined that only a few paces took him back and forth. Her eyes followed him to read what the movement might mean. His unaccustomed expansiveness had dried up; she was back to reading him in other ways, as she had learnt to. Was he pacing the cage of refusals for the last time, ritually, just before it was about to swing open wide, on America; never easy to read him.

  Depends what happens. I’ll go to Detroit. That’s it. I think it will be.

  Have they found a place for us? To live, in Detroit.

  Well, I’ll sleep somewhere, wherever they do. They are without wives, not been able to send for them yet. They’ve only been there a year… a bit more …

  He had come back, to stand before her, his legs touching her knees where she sat. I’ll look for something for us right away. An apartment. Even some rooms.

  You. ‘You’. Was she understanding him. What d’you mean?

  It will be good if you go to California. To your mother, just for some days.

  She bent forward with the flesh over her cheek-bones lifted in anguished pressure against her eyes, her head tipped to him, trying to scrutinize what might be written for her on his smooth tarnished-gold forehead under the fall of black silk hair.

  How did you think that.

  He had come to know the power of his particular smile, she had made him conscious of it, so that what he had been unaware of, when the impulse to smile came, was now a tactic to be employed; this is one of the possibilities of power that come with what he had though he couldn’t afford; what the privileged call love. The smile offered himself to her.

  Julie. You are not always right about your parents. Of course they are not like you. Not in many ways. But in some ways they are there— He put the flat of his hand on her breast-bone, just above her breasts. It was touch, a gesture, very different from his seeking out her breasts in a caress; it brought him closer to her than any sexual advance.

  It is like with my parents.

  It’s nothing like with yours. Your mother. What can I say. Then there came to her as a slap in the face, something that had been intended to be a pleasant surprise: How do you know my mother would want me there? Around-thirty-year-old daughter to prove to everyone that my mother is much older than her latest husband.

  And then what there was to be read in him was deciphered: Have you been in touch with her? Have you?

  On the phone, yes. The letters she sent, from her husband. They were a great thing—help—to get my visa. We won’t ever know how much. Until I took those letters, nothing happened. You know that.

  California. Take on the casino style, for my mother and her husband. Her voice was backing, away, away. California.

  The smile had opened a flow in him again. It is good sense. You don’t understand what it is like. Come in a country like I do. I have done—how many times? Even legal. It’s hard, nothing is nice, at the beginning, Julie. Without proper money to live. You are a stray dog, a rat finding its hole as the way to get in. I know you don’t mind, you even seem to like to live … rough … it’s like a camping trip to you. But this is different, it can be bad, bad. I can’t take you into it. I don’t want you to experience… I don’t mind for me—because this time I have the chance to move out of all that, finished, for ever, for ever, do what I want to do, live like I want to live. That is the country for it. There’s plenty of chances again now, there; you don’t read the papers, but the unemployment is nothing. Lowest for many years. Work for everybody.

  And the meantime. —She seems to force herself to speak.

  What is that?

  Before the chances to live the way you want to. What work will you do.

  Same as immigrants, always. Anything. If you have some brains and education, it doesn’t matter. I tell you, you don’t know what happens there. It isn’t your country, never get out of the garage! You don’t know—one of the biggest, the most important financiers in the whole world today was an immigrant from Hungary, he started there in New York as a waiter in a club. He was white, a Jew, yes. But people where I come from make it, there, even if not so high as that, they’re in computers, in communications, that’s where the world is!

  Women here—his home—do what their men tell them to. Is that what is happening in the makeshift walls of the lean-to, are there listeners with ears to the clapboard door hearing what is bein
g said, is he who ‘runs away from home’ (Uncle Yaqub) yet taking an assumption from all he abandons? He and she won’t go on talking about it: California. That may mean anything. That he has accepted her rejection; that she has accepted her assent.

  Chapter 39

  Just say the word

  There was no strain between them and that cannot be explained. Better not. For either to try to. Not everything between two people can be laid before The Table for resolution. That’s it. He was sorting out the contents of the canvas bag, there were things, time-fingered documents, to unburden himself of forever, now; legality is light to carry. He looked up to give her the smile as she opened the door … going out to his sister or somewhere about the house.

  She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end, the desert. The bean rissole vendor must have seen her, the man with a donkey cart hawking melons must have passed her, the nasal harmonies of house radios and the electronic call of the mosque trailed round her familiarly unfamiliar figure. The dog was waiting. If there is not The Table, there is always someone. She sat on the clump of masonry that had once been a house and the dog stood on its splayed thin legs a little way off. The desert. Always. The true meaning of the common word tripping off every tongue to suit every meaning, comes from the desert. It is there before her and the dog. The desert is always; it doesn’t die it doesn’t change, it exists.

  But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another. Shame, guilt, fear, dismay, anger, blame, resentment at the whole world and what it is—and names come up, names—for the sight of him as he is going to be. Again. Living in a dirty hovel, a high-rise one or a shed behind a garage, what’s the difference, with Christ knows what others of the wrong colours, poor devils like himself (as he used to say), cleaning American shit—she has seen the slums of those cities, the empty lots of that ravaged new world, detritus of degradation—doing the jobs that real people, white Americans, won’t do themselves. At least in her home, that city of the backward continent, lying under a car’s guts was a better human grade. And then the assault comes at her: in your city? Your country? All real people by law now, but who still does the shit work, neither Nigel Ackroyd Summers nor his daughter Julie. And even the ‘better human grade’ was denied the grease-monkey there, he was kicked out of that better grade, wasn’t he, right out; of your country.