Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  In the story there is no indication that Gordimer has any interest in why the lodger should perform so inhuman, indeed so diabolical an act, and more generally in what forces act upon young Muslim men to drive them to acts of terror. A decade later, as if to make amends for that incuriosity, she revisits the kernel situation – the Arab who for ulterior motives woos and marries a Western woman – and finds in it the seeds of a far more original and interesting line of development. The novel The Pickup (2001) is the fruit of that re-exploration.2

  Julie Summers is a white South African from a wealthy family. She is young, she has a good job, all is well in her life. One day her car breaks down in the centre of the city. The mechanic who fixes it is handsome, dark-eyed, foreign. She befriends him; eventually they have an affair.

  Abdu, as he calls himself, turns out to be an ‘illegal’, one of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners in South Africa without papers working on the fringes of the formal economy. Most of these illegals are from other African countries, but Abdu is from an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a country without oil or other natural assets. South Africa is one of several escape routes from poverty and backwardness that Abdu has tried: he has already had spells in Britain and Germany doing jobs the locals turn up their noses at.

  For the land of his birth Abdu has only contempt. It is not even a proper country, he says, just a patch of desert demarcated by lines some long-dead European drew on a map. His burning ambition is to become a legal immigrant, preferably to a wealthy Western democracy.

  Sex between Abdu and Julie is wonderful; for the rest they have little in common. She reads Dostoevsky; he reads newspapers. She sees people through a template of race and class; he sees them as either legals or illegals. He dislikes her circle of friends, disaffected members of the new post-apartheid intelligentsia, black and white, of whose lifestyle he disapproves and whom he considers naïve, ignorant of the real world. He prefers her father and her father’s banker colleagues, of whose crass values and moral vacuity Julie is ashamed, and who in turn want nothing to do with the penniless foreigner she has picked up.

  Abdu presses Julie to enlist her family on his side in his battle to become legal. But he has left it too late: from the immigration authorities he receives notice that he is to be deported.

  At this point he expects Julie to drop him, as he would drop anyone whose usefulness to him had expired. Instead she goes out and buys two air tickets, which she displays to him wordlessly. The gesture shakes him. For a moment he sees her in all her mystery, an autonomous being with hopes and desires of her own. Then the old barriers go up again: if the woman cleaves to him, it must either be because she is in thrall to him sexually or because she is playing a complicated moral game of a kind that only the idle rich have time for.

  Julie’s decision to accompany him home creates one practical problem. He cannot introduce to his family a woman who is no better than a whore. He will have to marry her first. So hastily they are married in a registry office.

  Why has Julie taken the momentous and apparently foolish step of abandoning a not unsatisfactory life in not uninteresting surroundings to run away to a benighted corner of the world with a man who, she must know, does not love her, who switches his very smile on and off as a way of controlling her?

  One reason is sex, with the meaning that Julie, with Gordimer behind her, gives to sex. Words may lie, but sex always tells the truth. Since sex with Abdu continues to be profoundly satisfying, there must be some deeply hidden potential to the relationship. Furthermore, in Julie’s feelings for Abdu there is something maternal and protective. Beneath the surface of his hard male contempt she finds him touchingly boyish and vulnerable. She cannot abandon him.

  Most of all, however, Julie is tired of South Africa in a way that, while it may be hard to find credible in someone so young, is all too easy to believe in someone of Gordimer’s generation – tired of the daily demands that a country with a centuries-long history of exploitation and violence and disheartening contrasts of poverty and affluence makes upon the moral conscience. Wistfully Julie quotes to Abdu (who is indifferent to poetry) lines by William Plomer: ‘Let us go to another country / Not yours or mine / And start again.’ (p. 88) Had James Baldwin not already annexed it, Another Country would be a fitting title for Gordimer’s book, capturing the animating concern of her duo – how to make a new life – better than The Pickup.

  So Julie and Abdu land in Abdu’s disdained country of origin, and the true name of Julie’s abductor is revealed: Ibrahim ibn Musa, whose three brothers are respectively a butcher’s assistant, a waiter, and a domestic servant. Ibrahim arrives not full of glory as the son who has built a successful life abroad, but as a deportee, a reject.

  Having settled his wife under his mother’s eye in the bleak provincial town where they live, Ibrahim repairs to the capital, where he spends his time haunting embassies, pursuing contacts, in quest of the elusive visa to the West.

  For Hamlet, having to kowtow to bureaucrats is one of the insults of daily life that poisons the will to live. No one in modern times has to endure more of the insolence of office than a Third World visa petitioner. Ibrahim, however, will swallow any amount of insolence as long as the beacon of Permanent Residence continues to glow. Permanent Residence is a blessed state. Permanent Residents are the masters of the world. With their magical papers in their wallets, all doors are open to them.

  What Ibrahim has to offer in return for a new life is somewhat paltry: a dubious degree from an obscure Arab university, a halting command of English, a deep thirst to shed the identity he was born into, a strategic readiness to accept the West at its own valuation, and, now, a trophy wife, ‘the right kind of foreigner’. (p. 140)

  While he waits for word from on high, Ibrahim sits in coffee shops with his friends talking politics. His friends are representative young Arab nationalists. They want the modern world and its appurtenances but they do not want to be taken over by it. They want to rid themselves of corrupt governments, by revolution if necessary, as long as revolution accommodates traditional morality and religion.

  Ibrahim is quietly sceptical. Getting involved in the politics of the Middle East will, in his eyes, doom him to permanent residence in poverty and backwardness. His longings are of another kind; they arouse him in ways he cannot articulate, setting him apart from his fellows.

  Australia turns him down, then Canada and Sweden. But after a year of petitioning the United States comes through with two visas. Ibrahim is jubilant. He and Julie will live in California (‘Everyone wishes to live there’); he will go into information technology or else, with the help of Julie’s stepfather, into the casino business. (p. 238) He cannot believe his ears when Julie announces she is not coming with him. She will remain with his family, she says; she has found another country, and it is not America, it is here.

  Ibrahim’s friends want a new, better Islam incorporating selected aspects of the West. Ibrahim’s family has the same vision, though in a more down-to-earth form. They want big cars, soap operas, cell phones, household gadgets. As for the rest of the West, they prefer to have nothing to do with it. The West is a ‘world of false gods’. (p. 189) They cannot understand why Ibrahim wants to go there.

  One of the more plausible explanations for why, despite a century of democratic movements and uprisings, Western-type democracy has failed to take root in the Middle East is that Arab nationalists have wanted to pick and choose from the Western cornucopia, taking over science and technology and/or educational systems and/or institutions of government without being ready to absorb their philosophical underpinnings as well, the false gods of rationalism, scepticism, and materialism. If, in this account, Ibrahim’s friends are in the process of falling into the same trap as their fathers and grandfathers, while Ibrahim is simply in the grip of a delusion, where does Julie stand?

  Plunged into a Middle Eastern family, Julie is at first dismayed by her lowly position as a woman as well as by the absence of the co
mforts she is used to. But she soon knuckles under and becomes a good daughter-in-law, doing the humbler household chores, contributing to the community by offering English lessons, commencing a study of the Koran, and generally adapting to a new rhythm of life.

  This is no mere show, nor is it an exercise in cultural tourism. We are unambiguously given to understand that in the course of the year she spends in Ibrahim’s home Julie undergoes a fundamental change of a spiritual if not religious nature. She begins to understand what being part of a family can mean; she also begins to understand how life can be so deeply infused with the Islamic code that everyday behaviour and religious observance can hardly be distinguished.

  None of this comes about because Ibrahim’s family is particularly exemplary. Though Ibrahim’s mother, who becomes Julie’s model and who gradually warms to his foreign bride, lives a deeply spiritual life, the other members of the family are unexceptional people of their place and time. Nor does the change occur because she gives herself over to Islam. Her spiritual development is effected instead by what one can only call the spirit of the place. A few blocks away from the family home starts the desert. It becomes Julie’s habit to rise before dawn and sit at the edge of the desert, allowing the desert to enter her.

  Ibrahim dismisses his wife’s engagement with the desert as a silly romantic game. Julie herself is well aware of Western romanticisation of the desert, of what she calls the ‘charades’ of people like T. E. Lawrence and Hester Stanhope. For her the desert has another meaning, one that she can pin down only by saying that it ‘is there always’. It is hard not to infer that in her lone daily confrontation with the desert, this young woman, who has already turned her back in most ways that matter on the allure of the materialistic West, is learning to face her own death. (pp. 198, 229)

  In Gordimer’s novel July’s People (1981), set in a future which by good fortune did not come to pass, South Africa is plunged into civil war. A white couple, their world turned upside down, seek refuge in the back country under the wing of a former black servant. Their world picture undergoes a chastening revision. As in The Pickup, it is the woman rather than the man who is sensitive and pliant enough to grow from the experience.

  The Pickup has an inward, spiritual dimension absent from July’s People. But it has a comparable political thrust, not only in its exploration of the mind of the economic migrant, or one type of economic migrant, but in its critique and ultimately its dismissal of the false gods of the West, presided over by the god of market capital, to whose whims Julie’s South Africa has abandoned itself so unreservedly and who has extended his sway even into Ibrahim’s despised patch of sand (Ibrahim’s father draws a small salary as a straw man in an international money-laundering operation).

  In its inspiration The Pickup is clearly indebted to Albert Camus’s story ‘The Adulterous Woman’, in which the main character, a French-Algerian woman, steals away from her husband in the night in order to expose herself to the desert and experience the mystical ecstasy, physical as much as spiritual, that it induces.3 Despite its length, The Pickup is more a novella than a novel, narrower in its range than such products of Gordimer’s major phase as The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979). Its genre becomes clearer once a subplot concerning a gynaecologist uncle of Julie’s falsely accused of unprofessional conduct – a subplot only tenuously connected with the story of Julie and Ibrahim – is stripped away.

  There are other ways in which The Pickup is less than perfect in its narrative art. The main plot, for instance, rests on an implausibility. There is no objective need for Ibrahim to humiliate himself in quest of a visa. His wife, with an expensive education and some business experience behind her, a trust fund in her name, and a mother married to a wealthy American, could in the blink of an eyelid attain the blessed state of residence in the United States, bringing Ibrahim along under her spousal wing. If Gordimer chooses to follow an implausible plot-line, it can only be because it is imperative that her heroine end up in the Arab Middle East, not in California.

  Despite such flaws, however, The Pickup remains a deeply interesting book, interesting as much for what it suggests about the trajectory that Gordimer’s oeuvre is following as for the two types she explores in it: the confused and conflicted young man, incurious about and even blind to the history and culture that have formed him, bound to his mother in his deeper psychic life, despising the desires of his own body, imagining he can remake himself by relocating to another continent; and the unexceptional young woman who trusts her impulses and finds herself by humbling herself. Not just an interesting book, in fact, but an astonishing one: it is hard to conceive of a more sympathetic, more intimate introduction to the lives of ordinary Muslims than we are given here, and from the hand of a Jewish writer too.

  If there has been a single principle that has animated Gordimer’s writings from the 1960s to the democratisation of South Africa in the 1990s, it has been the quest for justice. Her good people are people unable to live in or profit by a state of injustice; the people she subjects to her coldest interrogation are those who find ways of stilling their conscience, of accommodating themselves to the world as it is.

  The justice for which Gordimer hankers is broader than a just social order and a just political dispensation. In a less easily definable way, she also longs for just relations in the private realm. Gordimer’s justice may thus be said to have an ideal quality. What it cannot be said to have is a spiritual dimension. The inward turn of Julie Summers, her communion with the inhuman desert, thus marks a new departure in Gordimer.

  Two years after The Pickup Gordimer published a collection of short pieces, Loot, in which the spiritual turn in her thought is carried further, though not, it must be said, deeper. Pride of place in the collection belongs to a ninety-page cycle of stories called ‘Karma’, in which, with a more than glancing nod to Italo Calvino, Gordimer follows the adventures of a soul as it achieves or fails to achieve reincarnation in various individual human lives.

  The most powerful of these stories tells of a Moscow hotel chambermaid who falls for a visiting Italian businessman and lets herself be taken to Milan. There, tiring of her, the businessman marries her off to a cousin of his, a butcher and cattle-breeder. On a visit to the enterprise where the cattle are raised, she recognises for the first time what she represents to these Western Europeans: an animal, a breeder, a female unit with a functioning reproductive system. Unwilling to play such a role, she deliberately aborts the child she is carrying, a child that might have housed the homeless soul.

  In another of the ‘Karma’ stories a lesbian couple, liberal white South Africans with a bruising history of anti-apartheid activism behind them, decide to have a child. But then it occurs to them that they can never be sure the sperm they get from the bank will not have come from an apartheid torturer. Fearful that the being they bring into the world may reincarnate the spirit of the old South Africa, they retreat from their resolution.

  In these two stories the soul has knocked at the gate but been barred from entry: for its own sake, the women who guard the gate have decided not to admit it into the world as the world presently is. In another story in the series, however, the puzzled soul is granted not just incarnation but a double incarnation in a South African trapped in limbo by the race classification laws of the old apartheid state, with a genetic identity that makes her ‘white’ and a social identity that makes her ‘Coloured’.

  The ‘Karma’ series blends historical critique, mainly of the new world order, with wry observations, some of them cosmic in perspective (And this too shall pass, Gordimer seems to be saying), some metafictional: participating in one life after another, reflects the soul, is much like being a novelist inhabiting one character after another.

  The other substantial piece in Loot is in more familiar Gordimer vein: a report to the world on the state of Africa in the form of a story entitled ‘Mission Statement’.

  Roberta Blayne is British, in her forties, d
ivorced, a cool and sensible woman. She works for an international aid agency that would, by most standards, count as enlightened: in its estimation, Africa is not ‘ontologically incurable,’ though the cure has not yet been found. Roberta, who in this respect embodies the subdued pessimism about earthly improvement that pervades Loot, shares this view.4

  In the unnamed Anglophone African country to which she is sent, Roberta meets and has an extended affair with a senior civil servant, Gladstone Shadrack Chabruma, a married man, similarly cool and reserved. They become, in effect, a couple.

  With the end of her tour of duty nearing, Chabruma proposes to Roberta that she stay behind. He will marry her: as his second wife, the wife for official occasions, she will further his career while at the same time she can pursue her own. It is a solution of an African kind; his first wife, an uneducated woman characterised by a colleague of Roberta’s as a ‘homebody of the new kind, [a] city peasant’, will adapt. (p. 53)

  As so often with Gordimer, this story operates at the intersection of the private and the public. Although Roberta has been born and bred in England, she turns out to have an African skeleton in her closet. In fact, no one in England, we are given to understand – at least no one of a certain social class – can escape the shadow of that country’s imperial entanglement with Africa. In Roberta’s case, there was a grandfather who ran a mine in this very province, a grandfather whom she dimly recollects telling a story of how once a week he would dispatch an African servant to fetch a box of whisky from the store, a trip that took several days on foot. The servant would bear the box back on his head. ‘What heads they [Africans] have . . . thick as a log,’ the grandfather would say, and his friends would laugh. (p. 42)

  In a moving moment, Roberta lies weeping in Chabruma’s arms, owning up to this legacy of racist contempt, resisting an urge to cradle and caress her lover’s abused and insulted head. As a writer, Gordimer is at her most powerful in such epiphanies: gestures or configurations of bodies in which the truth of a situation emerges starkly and completely.