The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  And again: America, America. The great and terrible USA. Australia, New Zealand—that would have been something better? Anywhere would be. America. The harshest country in the world. The highest buildings to reach up to in corporate positions (there he is, one of the poor devils, the beloved one, climbing a home-made rope ladder up forty storeys); and to jump off from head-first. That’s where the world is. He thinks I don’t know; he doesn’t know. He is standing before her, conjured up by her rage against all that threatens him, waits for him: so young, his slender hands hanging ready for anything, at his sides, his defiant elegance—that silk scarf round his neck with its strong tendons, the black hair down his breast and again round his testicles and proud penis she sees beneath his clothes whenever she looks at him, the black eyes that never reveal what’s going on behind that face she discovered comes from his mother, as the traits of an ancient Greek, Egyptian or Nubian image may be rediscovered in far-removed living descendants.

  But there is no-one. Nothing imprinted on the desert. It is always; and what is thudding inside her like a road-worker’s stamp in a street is now.

  She is at one with the woman, his mother, to whom she should have been able to run, at one with the woman with whom she could not exchange, did not have, the right words for what she now shared with her. Only she herself, who had discovered him disguised as a grease-monkey—not the father, not Maryam, not anyone at all in the family where people were so close to one another—only she and the mother could experience the apprehension of, the rejection of what every emigration, this emigration, was ready to subject the son to. But the mother was at prayer; his mother had prayer. She should not be interrupted. Even if one were to have had the words in the right language.

  The dog went silently away. She sat on until the tumult slowly cleared within her, disentangled. The sands of the desert dissolve conflict; there is space, space for at least one clear thought to come: arrived at.

  When she came back to the house the prayer rug had been folded away. Mother and son were together in their privacy on her sofa. He looked up and signalled—come. Where he sat, he put an arm round her waist; Where have you been? A walk. Fresh air is good if it is not too hot, the mother said to her, speaking slowly so that she would understand. They looked at one another for a moment; she thought his mother knew—if not where she had been—where experiences were taking her.

  They retired to their lean-to together—that was the formal feeling of it before the following eyes of the mother. He had her by the hand, it was a gesture more for his mother than for her: as if to say, my foreign wife is with me, I am not alone.

  She dumped herself on the bed that had complained so much under the weight of love-making.

  I’ll write to Archie. My Uncle.

  Chapter 40

  Dear Archie,

  You won’t be too surprised to hear from me, and you’ll know that it probably means I’m coming to you—for something. Because you’ve always been the one I could ask. This time it’s money. Ibrahim has been granted a visa for America. It was never a problem to get one for me, but it has taken months and endless hassle to arrange for him. He’s been turned down by every other country he’s tried. I still don’t know how he’s done it—better not ask! You’ll understand that, after his experience in S.A.

  So we have the green light for the USA. But my dollars have run out. We couldn’t have and wouldn’t have expected his family to keep us. His earnings here (work he’s had as a favour from a relative) and the small sums I’ve been able to add by having the nerve to teach English, are not enough to pay our airfares and give us a breather when we get there. Could I ask, I am asking, could you possibly, somehow, let me have the equivalent of about 5,000 dollars? I know exchange control regulations may make this difficult, but any currency you could arrange to come to me from your contacts anywhere, would be fine. Ibrahim has a friend at a bank in the capital who will take care of the draft and get us the proper rate of exchange at this end. I am enclosing a sheet with all details of the bank for the transfer, however you can do it.

  Dear Archie, I would hope to pay back some time. I wanted to write to you, anyway, not long ago, about the possibility of a pre-inheritance from the Trust you know was set up—but that’s no doubt something complex that would take time, and we really have to have cash right now. So to be honest, I won’t be able to meet the debt too soon because we don’t know what our situation will be in the USA. But eventually, I’ll write again for your advice on how I could perhaps draw on that Trust. I suppose in America I could most likely get the same kind of work I used to do. I could contact the principals there, of the people I worked for in Johannesburg, it’s an international spider, legs down all over the place. If they make some sort of in-house request to employ me apparently a work permit won’t be a problem. For the moment, Ibrahim’s been granted one, I’m just the wife he’s supposed to provide for while she sits and watches TV.

  Archie, I don’t know how to say how grateful we’ll both be to you.

  You know I can’t ask my father.

  With much love, as it’s always been,

  Julie

  Chapter 41

  It came to her from herself with reproach, only now: she had assumed, in her outrage at the preposterous charge against Archie, that it had not been, could not be pursued; must have been dropped before evidence of his life-long professional reputation. Only now; so in the emotional conflation of what had happened, all at once, to him and (in her hand) the two airline tickets to take her and her lover out of the country, she had not written to him as she meant to do! Hadn’t written although in all her adventures round the world she was free to roam she carried in her address book, on Archie’s insistence—just in case—his fax and telephone numbers at his consulting rooms and at home.

  Ibrahim had talked to her about calling, but she was reluctant, and no point in pressing her now that she had come forth with the solution for them; he sensed it was better to let her achieve it in her own way; she seemed to shrink from some emotional complication in speaking to this uncle of hers. They went together to the capital to a friend-of-a-friend who was in the import business and sent the letter by fax.

  The draft came with incredible promptitude—in their experience, anyway, so accustomed to protracted patience, sitting it out isolated in the village in the desert that knows no time while officialdom teased with promises from week to week.

  Archie had sent six thousand dollars, not five. Following a day later there was a letter faxed through Ibrahim’s friend-of-a-friend. My dear Julie, What a relief to hear from you and know that your life is working out. We were told you came to the house before you left, whether it was to say goodbye or if you had heard about that crazy unpleasant business with a patient—sorry to have missed you. It was difficult to prove that the woman was a so-called borderline personality (psychiatrist’s diagnosis) but there’d been leaked information to my defence team that there was a history of such incidents in her past and they were able to obtain corroboration of this. I privately think, poor thing was concocting deliberate revenge on any man—happened conveniently to be me—in the resentment and anger she felt against some other man she couldn’t get at to damage. You cannot believe how incredibly supportive my patients were, there were more wanting to give evidence on my professional conduct and ethics than the lawyers could use. There I was advising you to engage good lawyers for your problem, when I was about to need them for myself! Never thought I’d be the male victim of sexual harassment—but there you are, there has to be a first time for some man. Tables turned. She was the one making unwelcome sexual demands on her doctor, not t’other way about. Test case. It went against her and I could have claimed damages but decided on the facts of the way medical colleagues as well as my patients indignantly rallied round and publicly vouched for me, not only in court but perhaps even more importantly in the press, I hadn’t been damaged … Sharon disagrees, she says the forgiveness and reconciliation we’re busy with in our
country doesn’t extend (I think she means descend, eh) to the level of someone who could have destroyed me. You know redhead Sharon, she wanted to go up to the woman in court and slap her face this side and that—those were the damages she thought of, just to start off with. What’s come out of the whole thing is that many of my fellow doctors have become afraid of their patients… I continue to trust mine, how else be their doctor?

  It’s over, we’re intact, we’re well. Please keep me posted wherever you are/go. Let me have an address. After I was told you’d come to the house that time, I asked Nigel for yours, he said he was not in touch with you, did not have it. I’m sorry it’s like that. Time will mend. Good luck in the U.S. to you both. You’re a brave girl. Love, Archie.

  Along with his generosity there was this, to her, another kind she would always need to know existed; Archie was as he had always been, unharmed, not making judgments others did, his own man; a surety to be found in no-one else, nowhere else.

  She had that uncle, this was the response from the family she cut herself off from! Under his dark gold skin there was an elation of red that added to the deep brilliance of those eyes.

  Now there is something good will be left over from the air tickets, I will have what you need to put down in deposit when I find a place for us, I can buy things to make it ready—for when you come.

  But with this money we’ll be able to get somewhere to live right away. Even some cheap hotel, Chicago, Detroit, whatever.

  They were thrust back to what they had not talked about since the first time he had spoken of it.

  Hotel? What hotel. How long can the money last if we start off like that. I can live very cheap with the other men in Detroit and look around and when I know if it’s going to be there, Detroit, Chicago—how can I say—I’ll have the money to find a decent place for us while you are all right in California.

  But you must have understood. Abdu! I never said I could do that.

  What is it you’re saying now. Julie—I told you, I can’t take you to live the way immigrants start, they must, unless money is going to fall on them from the sky. Now we have something, and I know how we must use this … luck … this from your uncle … like from the sky, but it is not millions, is it! Is it? It is from heaven, yes, but we can’t spend like a holiday, I must find work, I must find somewhere where you can live … can’t you understand that? We have to thank your mother, her husband for the letters that got us in, we have to thank your uncle for the money that buys even the air tickets that let us go. Your family is good to us. What is the matter with seeing your own mother, she wants it, she likes to have you with her for a while, that’s sure, and how do we know—

  What don’t we know?

  He breathed out exaggeratedly at her obtuseness, her lack of reality.

  He was smiling; he drew new breath. They, he—her husband got the letters from important people so easy. Yes? He knows people. We see that. It can be he will find something good for me, he’ll put me in with the right connections. Connections are everything, believe me, I know. We could be able even to go and live there, there are big centres in communications technology, it’s a nice climate, warm, like you have at your home, not hell hot as this place—never cold—Chicago is cold, isn’t it. California—wonderful. Everyone wishes to live there.

  His arms open wide, he doesn’t have the words, he is embracing California; or her. His gaze will not release her although they are standing apart.

  A creature caught by a light in the dark of private being.

  Just say the word.

  He recognized the moment, came over and put an arm round her, a hand against her cheek, mumbled soft sounds through the screen of her hair at her ear.

  There is something beguiling about submission, for one who has believed she has never submitted. Something temptingly dangerous, too: The Suburbs; The Table; a third alternative.

  Maryam was planning an elaborate farewell party for them.

  She meant it to be a surprise but Khadija made an oblique reference in her usual sharp way. —You never had a wedding. Everyone wants to wish you well on this other occasion—they say.— Ibrahim chaffingly asked his sister what she was up to and she began to cry. —You will also miss my wedding.— She could not say to this brother whom she knew so little, he had come and gone, so long, that her tears were because he was taking his wife away from her. His understanding was indeed different: so this party was to be a substitute for all that had been missed by the family—his marriage to a girl of their choice, the grandchildren, nieces and nephews, cousins, the common celebrations and mournings, the communion with brothers in the ritual of Holy Law that made right and righteous decisions, uncomplicated, for them, armed them against the other world into which, unwanted, unprotected, he wildly cast himself. But blessings are never to be dismissed, they are even secretly longed for, in the core of self, the seed from the genetic granary that remains embedded beneath all that is assumed elsewhere, among other places and people. There were gifts for his wife from the conversational tea ladies and the parents of school children whom she had taught, brass trays and phials of perfumes, a length of sequin-embroidered cloth; for him a souvenir someone had brought from Mecca (kindly encouragement to make a pilgrimage from whatever ends of the earth he might find himself). His father presented the couple, son and wife, with a beautiful old Koran. The mother there; no need to utter, the words came to him from her. He spoke at length and the weight of solemnity in their graceful language was translated to her to supplement her understanding: The Book is for the education of your children and your children’s children. Then there was even a gift from the wife of his Uncle Yaqub to prove to his sister, the no-good nephew’s mother, that if the Uncle refused money for the abandonment of familial, religious, community and national heritage, he was not mean. It was a table lamp very like the ones in the Uncle’s house, made in the flashing golden form of some overblown flower, unlikely to be a tulip, perhaps a water-lily, from whose metal petals small electric globes rose on gilded stamens. Leila had climbed on Julie’s lap to show the present she had made: they sat together looking at her drawing, the child watching the woman’s face to see her reactions to the offering. The picture showed a ship, which was something the child could never have seen, except on television, a tower or building, something between the tallest structure in the village, the minaret of the mosque, and an apartment block, which she must also have seen on television, a broken wall where two stick-figures sat, seen from the back, one big and one small, but both with large heads. Their one-line arms were looped round each other, the loops scored deeply. Two bodiless heads, front face, split by huge smiles hung, suns in the space above that was neither land nor sky. A painstakingly-striped watermelon (they both loved the messy orgy of eating together the fruit of the market) lay at the edge of one corner. A stick-dog with a drooping tail stood at the other. The child stayed proudly on Julie’s lap, holding her gift while Julie’s attention was drawn this way and that in talk with other people anxious to wish her well. Some composed what they had to say in the English they had learnt from her. There was interruption between them, laughter at mistakes.

  Maryam, in her sadness at all these symbols of parting, was happy for the couple: Wedding presents, she said. Everything in the life of this brother and the woman he mysteriously had had the good fortune to find for himself was differently timed, different from what she knew or could expect within the family.

  The whole street that, vision awake and asleep, Julie had in her mind, having taken the way past the same parked motorbike against the same fence, the same music coming from the same windows, the same veiled grandmother talking to herself on the same peeling leather-covered chair, to the path’s end in the desert, must have been roused by the high volume of chatter in the to-and-fro from the kitchen as the women of the house, of whom she was one, and the guest wives wove past one another with a balance of laden dishes, and every voice rose with the stimulation of feasting. The human cries in expr
ession of their occasion must have sounded out beyond the stump of last dwelling-place abandoned to the sand, wavered to be lost in the desert as the calls of the muezzin were and the cries that she had been told were of a pack of jackals in expression of their occasions where they roved, far off, at night. Then the bowls and plates stood around emptied of all except some leavings of an ingredient not to someone’s taste, here, and the juice swimming from some succulent dish devoured, there; and Maryam—it was she who had asked her employer’s wife for the loan of some discs—set dance music on Khadija’s CD player carried in, invading with decibels of its own. There was new laughter: what was this? It was music from the country where Ibrahim and his wife were going, its confident pulse, its dominant rapping voice shouting down all others. The old people sat calmly undistracted; the shoulders of the young moved irresistibly to the beat. She whispered something he couldn’t catch. I said, it’s great that people can get lit up without drink or something to sniff or shoot up. Come on—let’s dance.

  No—not here, men and women don’t dance together—not in front of parents, no.

  The lively shoulders of the brothers were revealing a familiarity of body with a mode of pleasures they must have learnt in forbidden places. It was a fine night. Later they sat talking under the awning at the back of the house while the women washed dishes and re-created the events of the party with the supplement of gossip and anecdotes about the departed guests. On a final look-around for dirty plates, she was alone in the family room: the empty sofa where the mother had her place. She happened to glance out of a window; there, at the gate, a summons, sat the dog. She went to the kitchen and, unnoticed, retrieved a handful of scraps. It was late; the street was deserted. She held out her hand, but the dog wouldn’t approach, she should have known by now, it would never come to her. That was all it had, in its hunger: its dignity that can’t be understood. She went through the gateway and put the food down in the dirt; it had its eyes familiarly on her, unmoving. She turned her back and went into the house. From the window she now saw the dog come to the food and eat.