The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  His insistence drove them into silence. —There is no time for a mood to pass. Two days. That’s it. I want to know, has she talked to you. This business. Staying here. In this place. Have you said anything like that to her? Have you? I need an answer. Has she been talking like this?—

  Amina looked round over the bundle of her baby at the others and shook her head conclusively, earrings swinging, in mandate of denial.

  He had the thought of getting one of the women to speak to her; but he now felt no one of them really was to be trusted. Never mind teaching a few words of English, she had influenced them with her rich girl’s Café ideas of female independence.

  In his father’s face, the slow lowering and raising of thick eyelids and the twitching parentheses at either corner of the mouth, he saw that the response was silent reproach, brought up, deserved, for being too proud and foolish to have taken the chance offered him, Al-Hamdu lillah, by his Uncle Yaqub to stay where he, a son, belongs.

  Again the laconic response: a wife follows what her husband wishes.

  This from a father who the son knew did what his wife in her wisdom and character, yes, Al-Hamdu lillah, knew was right.

  Facing himself this way and that, where to turn— Maryam. Maryam, alone. With the other women, she had said nothing. Maryam: of course, who was the first to see blazoned on his face as she left the house for her work as a servant, I’m not going. Maryam made herself the friend, acolyte, it is his little sister Maryam who had the idea of the occupations, the English teaching, Maryam who made his wife at home in this place, well, all right, gave her something to do in the meantime, waiting with a poor devil all those months applying for visas. Whom else to turn to. Like a blood-letting, confront her.

  Summoned on her return from work for charges against her, and she knows it at once, it slows her feet as she comes into the house from the place beneath the awning where the child Leila has been sent to fetch her. Alone; he’ll see her alone, without the twittering support of the women.

  —What does she say to you. I want to know. What do you tell her, you are the one, you tell her what to do here, you make her your sister here, afraid to be without you, the ladies that offer tea and learn English, the schoolteachers who flatter her. I want to know. What have you done. Who told you to do this. Did you ask me, your brother? Come, I want to hear from you what you have been saying to her.—

  He has a power over this girl he will never have over his wife Julie, and that he would never want to have, it is part of what he emigrates from, every time he gets away. While he exerts it, it sickens him, the anger his sister fearfully sees rising in him. —Come. Speak, speak. What have you done.— She has been weeping through his tirade.

  He cannot make out what she’s saying now. —What? Speak!—

  The girl is an idiot. What else can you expect. Never getting out of this place, accustomed to being spoken to as I am speaking to her, by brothers like me.

  Where else to turn to.

  He cannot evade any longer. Her presence has been following him about the house from confrontation to confrontation, hearing him, aware of his frustration, his failure to extract from anybody any answers real to him; her authoritative version of his face is before him all the time. If she is at prayer—she is the only one from whom he will hold back, the others have been burst upon. He will wait. Everyone keeps out of the family living-room. Away from him. Even the children are hastily snatched when they linger at the leading doors. He sits in one of the upright chairs second-hand from Uncle Yaqub when his house was redecorated. Facing her empty throne. Biding his time. There is no cyclone of emotion of which she does not occupy the still eye of his respect. Nothing, ever, can take precedence over that.

  He does not have to wait long. She comes into the room as if it is at her summoning that he is there, and occupies her sofa. He gets up to greet her and takes a chair nearer her she indicates with a half-tilt of a hand from her lap.

  She knows what has happened. Or rather what threatens to happen—it’s seeped through the house in whispers and in the supersonic of thoughts. She must have had related to her many versions. But he tells her all, over again all comes from his own mouth as only he can know it. She asks questions, gives no opinions.

  This girl did not have a family at home in her country.

  Well, of course she has, but she does not get on well with them—her father.

  Her mother is dead, inna lillah, may the Lord have mercy on her daughter.

  Her mother remarried and she’s well-off—she lives in America and will welcome her.

  She found our life here strange to her.

  Well, yes, of course she must have but you know she has made the effort—to fit in—just for while we had to be here.

  This time, is there suitable work for your ambitions already arranged for you in that country.

  Not yet—wonderful opportunities there that have not been where I’ve been away before!—other times, those other countries.

  She wished to have a child.

  Yes and I would wish it, but not until I know we are settled, my work, and a home where we are going to spend our lives.

  She gets up, weighty in her robe. Her left foot falters for balance.

  She’s getting old; this is what you return to, abandon, each time.

  Mother—

  But she, who always has advice and a solution, for everyone, whether this is welcome or not, has none for him. My son—she gives him her blessing— Allah yahfazak, and she leaves the room, he knows, for her place of prayer.

  Mother?

  Ah, an ally, that’s it; but not his. An ally of the foreigner— she will be the one to restore the son to the mother, lure him, bring him home at last.

  Chapter 45

  There is a terrible strength that comes to a dread decision aghastly opposed by other people: their words, supplication, silent condemnation, are hammer blows driving that decision deeper and deeper into its certainty.

  Maryam’s clinging affection and unexpressed joy at the idea that her unique friend, from another world and closer in understanding than any sister, would stay in her husband’s home, like other women, was the only support; his mother— no indication, no word or sign transmitted from her, her usual stately presence supervised calmly in the kitchen where the girl, Ibrahim’s wife, continued to do what was assigned to her, just as if the mother were not aware that she was supposed to be emigrating with the son in twenty-four hours. And the girl slices onions as if she cannot be aware of this either.

  Twenty-four hours. The decision that has been growing in her, changing her as the cells in the body renew themselves spontaneously, becomes a clench of panic: it’s happening too quickly, too soon, the time has come before she’s really ready—

  Funk.

  Way back, The Table has the word.

  But it’s all been thought out, felt through, dismissed, rejected as crazy (yes, he’s not alone in making that accusation; become self-accusation), renewed, taking over—final—many times in the months: the meantime, as he called it.

  He would not allow himself or her to lie down on their bed, to submit even to exhaustion that night. If he could plead, reason, argue, bargain, reproach, rage long enough the time that was left would sweep her in this flash flood to the airport, onto the plane that would carry her away with him just as she had carried herself with him, deported to this place.

  Listen … we’ll make a good life there. You want me to do something I want, the kind of position … use my brain, study—you always tell me that. You are the one who knows I can do it. You’ll be happy. You’re happy with me—I make you happy—yes, and you, how can I be without you. A couple of weeks, while you’re in California, I don’t have to worry if you’ve got everything you need—all right, but we have some money, I can even come there to see you. I will. You’ve followed all this way with me, I’m so lucky, I know, so how can it be—

  So why? Why? Why did you come? Why—you bought that ticket for yourself? You hu
ng on to me? What for? Don’t say it! Just don’t say it. Not now.

  His conviction that ‘love’ is a luxury not for him has found its proof. Yes.

  Won’t have her say it; she sees. Say something else that has the same meaning.

  Ibrahim, you’d think I was leaving you, the way you take it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going back there, I’ve told you, told you. I’m in your home.

  You are a liar. Why did you never say one word to me? You were lying to me all the time. Here in this bed with me kissing and lying. Fucking and lying.

  I never lie to you.

  Ah no? You only lie with the mouth? Keep quiet when there is what you must say, that’s not lying?

  I thought, I really thought you saw how I was beginning—you make it so hard to explain—to live here. Oh my god. How I was different—not the same as I was back there when you met me. I thought we were close enough for you to understand, even if it was something you—didn’t expect …

  Not lying when you got the money from your uncle for the tickets? Not lying when you signed the papers for the visa, not lying when you went smiling to the embassy to show them your face, my wife ‘accompanying me’, you saw it written on my visa? No? That was not lying? Or was that true then, and now—I don’t know, out of the sky something somebody has changed your mind, driven you crazy? Where did you get the idea from, how, where?

  And while his anguish batters them both she now knows where. The desert.

  But she cannot tell him that. The stump of wall in the sands where the street ends. The dog waits and a child places a hand.

  She cannot tell him that.

  He shuns the desert. It is the denial of everything he yearns for, for him. And if he should remember—the enthusiasms of some members of The Table—his next derision could be that her decision was a typical piece of sheltered middle-class Western romanticism. Like picking up a grease-monkey.

  Confusion is singing in his ears. But what is the confusion? No confusion; I should know that. Like me, like me, she won’t go back where she belongs. Other people tell her she belongs. She looks for somewhere else. I’m staying here. Here!

  The elegant suitcase is standing packed. Finally he can’t stop staring at it. He lunges to it and struggles with the digital lock, the combination comes to him and he gets it open and begins to throw out all her things; on the bed, on the floor. Now she will do it. Put them back, give in.

  She comes to him through the mess. She tries to draw him against her tightly, breasts to chest, belly to belly, but he resists wildly and the embrace becomes a parody of the violence that has never existed between them. Some short time before dawn of the day on which they are to emigrate, like corpses laid out side by side on what was their bed: sleep drugs with its ancient promise from childhood, it will be all right in the morning.

  Chapter 46

  He got up dazed and dulled with the hangover of emotion and went to his brothers. She woke to their low voices behind the lean-to door. She left the bed, dizzied for a moment, and then collected the contents of her suitcase scattered everywhere. She folded some garments on the wire he had rigged up for her and the bright plastic hangers she had found in the market, hung the pants, dresses and shirts. The shoes went to their place in a row under the window.

  He came back into the room with a bucket of hot water. He saw her things, the clothes hung up, folded, the shoes where she kept them. He looked only for a moment; and not at her; he poured water into the bowl on the table and began to shave. Although his back was turned, she could see his face in the little mirror strung to the wall in which he met himself as he was on this morning. She saw, once more, his cheek thrust taut by his tongue as he delicately shaved close to his glossy moustache.

  From the neat pile of underwear on the bed she took a bra and panties and began to dress.

  He was aware of her movements somewhere around him, somehow slowed, as his own were. When he had shaved and washed he poured his water into the empty jar kept beside the table and refilled the bowl from the bucket he had brought. He heard her washing as he dressed himself for the journey in jeans she had learned to iron just as well as the black woman she paid to do it, back at the cottage, a shirt she liked best, and the silk scarf that was his plume. While her back was to him he happened to glance and saw in the little mirror the gestures of her hands, the upward tilt of her neck as she looped her earrings into her ears; once more.

  He spoke. Are you coming to eat?

  She looked round as at a call. Yes, in a moment.

  Everyone was at home; apparently Maryam, the brothers, had been given leave to arrive late at work, be present for this latest farewell. The brother-in-law was unemployed at present, anyway. Over food there was subdued chatter, suitable to an imminent departure, on the route to be taken, the country where a connecting aircraft would be, the time-change in space, a further separation of the voyagers from kin. She appeared, dressed in what became her best, a combination of pants made of handsome hand-woven local textile and a jacket bought long ago on some jaunt in Italy. A necklace given her by Maryam brought the exchange of a slight smile between them. When Ahmad asked her how long was the wait between connecting planes, she answered round about three hours. Ibrahim corrected, more like four or five, there are always delays on airports this side of the world—drawing laughter in which she joined. Daood the coffee-maker turned fondly to his brother. —Maybe you’ll be lucky and everything will go all right, for you, on time.—

  Muhammad, excused from school, was quick. —And when Julie goes next month, it must be lucky for her too!—

  So she understood what the low voices behind the door had been about: it was arranged among the adult brothers that the official family version of what had happened would be that their brother’s foreign wife would be following him as soon as he knew in what city of this immigration he would find himself established.

  He kept away from her, in the company of the family, making sure there was no chance for them to be alone until the hour of the taxi arrived for him. Let her have an idea of what she doesn’t realize, all his pleading, arguing, of no effect, that she will be in this house, this family, this village, this place in the desert, without him, without the love-making she needs so much, without anyone to talk to who, as he does, knows her world, without—yes, he can admit it to himself only, without his love for her. That weakness that is not for him.

  She could not approach him. He held her off by his right, as she had asserted hers. She was not going; in all the pain of seeing him return to the same new-old humiliations that await him, doing the dirty work they don’t want to do for themselves, taking the hand-out patronage of the casino king (stepfather, is he) as the chance of being the Oriental Prince, quaint way-out choice of the mother’s daughter. That’s it. That’s reality.

  Neighbours came to see off the lucky one bound for America. The taxi ordered so well in advance drew up in the home street before the family house exactly when expected. In the gathering she stood with him now, their clothes touching in contact, they would keep up together the version he had arranged with the brothers; it was all she could do for him for the present, her lover, her wonderful discovery back there in a garage. Everyone embraced him, children ran to him to touch the great adventure, the achievement that is emigration, not understood but sensed.

  Muhammad rushed up with the canvas bag and neighbours added plastic carriers with gifts of food for the journey. The son embraced the family in the order of protocol they knew, embraced his father and then, last, his mother. She blessed him. And made a slight movement as if directing: her son embraced his wife. Before them all, the women who watched from behind curtains across their street, the men who looked away from her where they mended their cars and motorbikes, the close neighbours who flitted in like swallows to visit, the children Leila brought along for games—he and she held one another, and there was a kind of gasp of silence. Some old man with the loud voice of the deaf broke it.

  —She’s
not going?—

  —Couple of weeks.—

  —Bismillah. That’s much better.—

  —When he has a place.—

  He was walking to the taxi. The owner-driver everyone knew stood grinning, door held wide, a kindly man with a fierce face resurrecting genes of some ancient desert warrior.

  He bent his head to enter and held himself straight in the sagging, tattered passenger seat, looking ahead as if he had already left. The driver banged the door several times to get it to hold shut, laughed to the gathering and capered round to take his place at the wheel.

  Ibrahim had abandoned this place again, his eyes were on the road, the arrival at the same airport, the initiation through security body-check, handing over of ticket and passport where the visa is plainly stamped, cannot be doubted this time, sight of the same canvas bag borne away on a moving belt, the pressure of other bodies, leaving, pushing close at the boarding call. The plastic bags of gift foods like those he’s been given shoved into overhead lockers, the blocked gangway where he will thrust and jostle to find his seat. Close on either side their breath, their heat, you can’t get away from them, poor devils like himself. The rites of passage.

  He does not look back at the raised hands and faces, some smiling at his happy chance, one or two crumpled in tears not for his departure but in reminder of another, closer parting, endured.