The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  —How was the journey.—

  —The journey was fine, but you know it is very far—where Ibrahim and I came from.—

  —We know. He sent us a letter. Some day it came. I hope you will like it here. It is a village only.—

  —I hope you will show me your village.—

  —Ibrahim will show.—

  The two young women looked at one another in deep incomprehensibility, each unable to imagine the life of the other; smiling. It was perhaps right then that she made the decision: I have to learn the language.

  One of the doors led from the party directly into the room that obviously had been vacated for Ibrahim and his chosen wife. The elegant suitcase and the canvas bag stood as they had, way back in her cottage. He closed the door on the company clearing up the feast in the communal room.

  There was the huge old, high bed with its carved head-and footboards. An array of coloured covers under a crocheted white spread. She was admiring: how splendid. Ibrahim, what a bed.

  He saw it; it is his mother’s and father’s bed, the only splendour of their marriage, the absurd pretension of the start of driven poverty, the retreat into which each has collapsed exhausted every night for all their years. It is the bed in which each will die.

  It’s the bed in which he was conceived.

  Julie began to unpack gifts they had brought.

  No. Not now. Tomorrow we’ll give them. It’s enough for today.

  He tugged back the lace curtains at the window. Tomorrow. He would insist that his parents move back into this room, he and she must find somewhere else to sleep.

  A little later she went over to him. What I need now is a long, hot bath. Where’s the bathroom?

  There was no bathroom. Had she thought of that, when she decided to come with him. This place is buried in desert. Water’s like gold is in her country, it’s got to be brought up from deep, far down, pumped to this village—what there is of it. Had she any idea of what a burden she would be. So there it is. Madness. Madness to think she could stick it out, here. He was angry—with this house, this village, these his people—to have to tell her other unacceptable things, tell her once and for all what her ignorant obstinacy of coming with him to this place means, when she failed, with all her privilege, at getting him accepted in hers. Tomorrow. The other days ahead.

  And it was as he knew it was going to be.

  She wants to see ‘everything’. They haven’t been in his parents’ house more than two days when she says, if he doesn’t feel like coming along, if there are people he needs to consult, things he needs to do, she’s quite happy to explore the village, hop on a bus and see the capital, on her own.

  Of course. Of course. Independent. This is the way she’s accustomed to living, pleasing herself. Again. But that’s impossible, here. He has to be with her, some member of the family, if there could be one who could be understood, has to accompany her everywhere beyond a few neighbourhood streets, that’s how it is in the place he thought he had left behind him. It’s not usual for women to sit down to eat with the men, today was a special exception for the occasion—does she understand. It’s enough, for these people, that she goes about with an uncovered head—that they can tolerate with a white face, maybe. He has sharply resisted his mother’s taking him aside to insist that his wife put a scarf over her head when leaving the house or in the company of men who were not family; resisted with pain, because this is his mother, whom he wanted to bring away to a better life. And she, the one he has brought back with him, all that he has brought back with him, is the cause of this pain.

  Chapter 20

  It’s not an alarm clock you fumble a hand out to stifle. The rising wail lingers and fades, comes again as if a dream has been given a voice, or—there’s the grey, lifted eyelid prelude of dawn in the room—some animal out in the desert sounds its cry. There are jackals, they say.

  It’s the call to prayer.

  The first adjustment to any change must be to the timeframe imposed within it; this begins with the small child’s first day at school: the containment of life in a society commences. The other demarcations of the day set by that particular society follow, commuter time, clock-in time, canteen break time, workout time or cocktail time, and so on to the last divide of the living of a day, depending on your circumstances. Five times each day the voice of the muezzin set the time-frame she had entered, as once, in her tourist travels, she would set her watch to and live a local hour different from the one in the country left behind.

  After much discussion in the language she couldn’t understand but whose mixed tenors of hurt feeling and obduracy she felt intensely—somehow herself the cause of it—in the presence of the father’s and son’s contestation and the monumental silence of his mother ignoring her, they had taken the elegant suitcase and canvas bag and moved to the lean-to room and an iron-frame bed. There were shifting sounds beyond the house wall and the clang of the front door grille. The father accompanied by only one of the brothers went to dawn prayers at the mosque. Abdu-Ibrahim beside her turned and folded the pillow over his ear against the muezzin’s summons. At noon, afternoon and evening he seemed not to hear it, either, without having to block his ears. She asked what were the other functions of the muezzin?

  There isn’t any muezzin, there’s a recording and a loudspeaker, you see it on top of the mosque, that is what we have in the miracle of technology in our place.

  But he went, without comment, to Friday prayers with his father and a day after arrival had begun to wear the skullcap tossed aside with his clothes she could see from their bed when the muezzin opened the day for her. The cap was intricately embroidered with silver thread, she guessed by his mother; he warned her to keep respectfully clear and quiet when his mother spread her small velvet rug and swayed her forehead to it over her obeisant bulk in a private trance of prayer in the sheltered angle of a passage where members of the household came and went.

  So she wanted to see the place. What is there to see in a place like ours.

  Not Cape Town where they were going to start a business by the sea and famous mountain.

  Tourists don’t come here, what for. The tomb of Sidi Yusuf, the holy man from long ago, supposed to be why this place grew. Not much of a shrine, only people from round about in the desert come to it.

  She put her arms round his back and rested her lips against the glossy black hair above his nape. I’m not a tourist.

  He took her with his sister, Maryam, to a large vacant lot with a trampled fence and a gate hanging without function. Market day. Rickety stalls distorted by heat were stacked and spread, spilling to the stony sand geometric arrangements of vegetables, fruit, dried teguments and strips of something unidentifiable—fish or meat—grain, flat bread, concoctions of things—creatures?—imprisoned in jars, towers of voluptuous watermelons swagged with green and gold stripes, and garlands of strung bicycle wheels, vehicle hubcaps and battered tools, old radios, gutted refrigerators assembled—an objets trouvés art work, she told him delightedly. She asked Maryam about a man squatting at work on an ancient portable typewriter while a woman spoke volubly at him. — Many don’t know how to write. They pay for a letter.— Another sat with bright powders of different colours in little dishes spread on a rug—spices rather than potions, she supposed. Cobblers: the piles of old shoes whose mis-shape taken on from living feet suggest the dead. A man with the appearance the blind have of talking aloud to themselves was intoning what must be religious texts. Ibrahim had to hang about while she gazed along the stock of a stall selling posters, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Dome of The Rock, the splendidly intricate calligraphy of inscribed verses from the Koran.

  I want to know.

  He gave a little snort of a laugh, and a gentle push for her to move on. Third-hand clothes were piled for a fourth-hand wearing, sunglasses and cellphones were offered by touts; there were stacked plastic plates, cups, bowls, and enamelled jugs, cooking pots, kettles decorated with
flower patterns of organic ostentation that seemed tactless in a desert village.

  Why does the world dump these hideous things here, don’t the people make much better things for themselves?

  These don’t break so soon.

  But she takes responsibility upon herself. Why do we send only such shit.

  The sister with her few words of English was trying to follow, her eyes on him, his words.

  Because here there’s no money to pay for anything else.

  Here is where she has insisted on coming, here she is, with the gaudy tin basins that offend her, the children wearing oddments of the fourth-hand cast-offs, fancy running shoes clumped at the end of bone-thin legs—and who knows how they got hold of those—pestering to sell two or three cigarettes or a handful of sweets.

  Later in the day the Uncle came to fetch his nephew and bride for a visit to his house—he no longer lived next door, in the street where Ibrahim was born; other relatives, distant cousins, were the occupants now. The car was hung with amulets, illuminated Arabic texts, and pungent with some washroom scented spray, his laughing guttural voice could have been disc-jockey chatter accompanying the winding incantations of Easternized American pop on the car radio. Ibrahim lowered a window and as they passed she was able to identify the market-place again, emptied, taken over by stray goats, crows, and a scatter of boys playing football. She was oddly conscious of him, Ibrahim, her husband, yes—watching her as if to perceive before she did what she might be seeing. This street was the only tarred one in the village, men were sitting under the drooping slant of rough awnings drinking coffee, some apparently playing a game—difficult to make out what it was, from a moving vehicle. Everywhere, selling and buying. Black-draped women trailed capering children who could have been anywhere—the exuberance of childhood is a universal response to being alive; his, in this village, might not after all have felt so different from hers, climbing over Gulliver in a beautiful garden, falling asleep with plush toys bought by Nigel Ackroyd Summers in duty-free airport shops of the world. It is only with growing up, becoming the man he is and the woman she is, that circumstances come between you. Outside the haphazard stretch of sheds and buildings either half-completed or half-fallen-down, difficult to say which, she sees for the first time in her life two old men actually sharing a water-pipe, the hookah of illustrations to childhood’s Scheherazade stories. So much life!

  But he closes the smeary window as the Uncle bounces the car off tarmac onto the sand track that must lead to his new address.

  The Uncle’s house has everything to the limit of the material ambitions that are possible to fulfil in this place—if his nephew, entering, needs to be reminded of this, which is always with him, implacable warning that prods and pierces him, flays him to rouse the will to carry on washing dishes in a London restaurant, swabbing the floors of drunken vomit in a Berlin beer hall, lying under trucks and cars round the block from the EL-AY Café and emerging to take the opportunity—what choices are there—to become the lover of one of those who have everything (the Uncle could never dream of) and who could be a way to fulfil a need—a destiny!—to realize one’s self in ambitions hopeless in this place.

  The aunt, bound about with gold jewellery on wrists and ox-blood-fingernailed hands, withdrew Julie to the women’s quarters of the house, where the daughters remained during the visit. She and the aunt returned to the men—Ibrahim explained afterwards it was not allowed for a male to see his female cousins, although, what seemed in contradiction of orthodox modesty, while one of the young women was dressed in flowing tradition like the mother, the other daughter wore jeans and the latest in high platform-soled boots.

  Julie notices that he is—can it be!—somehow touched by dread, foreboding, in the rooms that the Uncle is proudly showing them round. She cannot ask—among all her questions later—what it was that came to him in that harmlessly vulgar house as they were seated on carved and gilded chairs and plied with sherbet, dates and sweetmeats. The backyard repairs have become a large workshop hidden behind the elaborate tiled wall of the courtyard with its hibiscus and canopied swing-couches. There, the Uncle explains and asks Ibrahim to translate for her, he has district government contracts to maintain and repair all official vehicles and ministers’ cars, he is the official agent for American and German cars, American, German and Italian spare parts and, of course, his is the only service anyone who has a good-model vehicle comes to from villages even several hours’ journey across the desert.

  That is what he has made of himself.

  —Remember you used to come to help out when you were a kid, the wrecks we fixed up? In the old yard?—tell her!—

  —She knows. She knows I learned from you how to pretend to be a mechanic.—

  This in their language; she could only laugh when they did, not aware it was at the vision of him, that first time, the grease-monkey under a car.

  Returned to their lean-to he lay on his back on the bed in his unconscious grace as he had at her cottage, eyes deep as wells she would feel herself as if straining precariously to look into. That Uncle’s made a go of it, hasn’t he.

  Yes.

  She often has the sense that he is not looking at her when his regard is on her; it is she who is looking for herself reflected in those eyes.

  Yes. The success you can have in this place.

  But are they talking from the same premise? Is she wryly admiring the success, on a humble scale, of a Nigel Ackroyd Summers she has removed herself from, far as she could, by way of the EL-AY Café and a man without papers or a name; is he drily remarking there is no comparison with the success available to those with access to financial institutions quoted on the stock exchange?

  Neither knows.

  They make love, that unspoken knowledge they can share; that country to which they can resort.

  Chapter 21

  Where the street ended, there was the desert. Led by the children down the row of houses like the family one, lean-tos and haggard walls, bright motifs of paint, dusty plants, leaning bicycles, cars sputtering from broken exhausts, men lounging, women at windows, washing hooked on a fence, more children who race and skitter, garrulous radio discourse, the man selling bean rissoles calling out—this everyday life suddenly ends.

  It was bewildering to her: come to a stop. At the end of a street there must be another street. A district leads to another district. And a road, a highway that links one place of habitation to others. There was the mound of detritus unravelled, tin cans rolled away, spikes of glass signalling back to the sun; and then, in the terms by which humans judge the significance of their presence—nothing. Sand. No shapes. No movement. When she came back to the house: It’s not the wind months, he told her. You don’t want to be here for that, believe me.

  She laughed. We are here.

  They are right, those people in the village he is aware see her as something they never have, a tourist. Tourists don’t endure the bad seasons, that’s not for them.

  Julie is accustomed to being active. He and she can’t sit about in the house all day, waiting for—what to do next. She wants some little expedition into the desert but is aware of his distaste—the heat is too bad and you need a four-wheel-drive. The Uncle has generously lent them—Ibrahim insists—no it’s my gift to your marriage the Uncle pronounces carefully in English—a car in fair condition and they drive around the village, the school from which some teacher managed to get him sent on to education beyond memorizing the Koran, what used to be the sports field, donkeys there now; a lop-sided sign whose script she had him translate for her indicates a boarded-up communal hall, stalls propped one against the other—a fall of shavings from a carpentry shop, men, always men, drinking coffee—the groan of a generator and thick steam coming from the pipes of a dilapidated hospital, the mosque where she can only picture him on Fridays, she is a woman, and even she who may go anywhere in the world, do as she likes, cannot enter. What else is there: this is his place.