Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

Ibrahim ibn Musa. They have traipsed across the stony crunch of the airfield in the shouldering of others, entered an echoing babble in which movement and sound are united confusion, and now are before the immigration booths. A man behind the glass partition lowers his stamp. Ibrahim ibn Musa.

Her visa takes a moment’s scrutiny. The wife; Ibrahim ibn Musa. That’s all; done.

An airport in a country like this is a surging, shifting human mass with all individualism subsumed in two human states, both of suspension, both temporary, both vacuums before reality: Leaving, Arriving. Total self-absorption becomes its opposite, a vast amorphous condition. The old women squatting, wide-kneed, skirts occupied by the to-and-fro of children, the black-veiled women gazing, jostling, the mouths masticating food, the big bellies of men pregnant with age under white tunics, the tangling patterns of human speech, laughter, exasperation, argument, the clumps of baggage, residue of lives, sum of lives (which?), in a common existence-that-does-not-exist. Julie is no different, she has no sense of who she is in this immersion, everyone nameless: only him, officially: Ibrahim ibn Musa.

He was very efficient, speaking his own language, making enquiries, engaging in exchanges of colloquial ease with those he approached. He retrieved the elegant suitcase and the canvas bag, and pushed and shouted to grab the door of a taxi before others could get to it. The drive from the airport to the outskirts of the capital on a pot-holed tarred road was a contest with other vehicles pressing up to overtake one another like horses on the home stretch of a race. She was suddenly exhilarated and laughed, feeling for the hand of this new being. I’m here! I’m here! What she meant: can you believe it? I’m with you.

She dodged about to see through this window and that the silhouette of the city emerging blindingly beyond — to her eyes — the decaying few industrial buildings, vehicle repair shops and tarpaulined nooks under Coca-Cola signs where men sat drinking coffee. White, white, sunlight was white on the cubist shapes of buildings pierced by the index fingers of minarets.

We don’t stay any time in town. We go to the bus station now.

I want to walk about, look at everything.

All right. Not today. There are not many buses where we must go.

The bus station on the periphery of the city was a smaller version of the airport concourse. Only here there were cages of chickens among the bundles of life-time possessions. He discouraged her from going to the lavatory. This’s a dirty place.

You forget that I come from Africa? I’ve camped out all over, stayed in villages, you know my friends — we didn’t exactly look for tiled bathrooms—

His brow twitched with impatience. You don’t know this.

She was overcome with love for him: he is in shock, coming back home. She must make light of his irritation with her. Ibrahim … (trying out the name, listening to it, feeling it on her tongue). So what d’you want me to do? Wet my pants on the bus? But she laughed alone.

Wait. He caught by the arm one of the men in a voluble group and asked something that was enthusiastically answered by all at once. There’s a place we can get coffee just down the road; you can go, while we are there, it will be better.

But the bus? Ibrahim. We’ll miss the bus?

There is half-an-hour.

They had to load one another again, like the donkeys seen on the airport road, and he grasped her firmly by the hand, dodging her through buses, cars, trucks and bicycles, wily as the roving stray dogs. Pulled along, she did not need to look where she was going, her gaze darted everywhere about her, snatching a collage of bright and dark images, a vendor with bracelets of bread up his arms, a hag-face begging, the beautiful hands of a baby holding tight on its mother’s shrouding veil, the bared grin of a man momentarily staring at her, the shop signs with their flourishes touting heaven knows what. But he — it was as if he shut himself away from what he was navigating; he distanced himself as he often had done from that other — how remote — café, The Table where she had taken him. This ‘café’ was a tiny shop perceived as darkness by eyes looking in from the white glare; objects strung across the ceiling and a juke-box winding out loud nasal music.

He — Ibrahim — spoke to the white shape of a tunic (the face of the man could not be made out at once) and had from him permission to use his personal outhouse. Her husband (another new identity) had to accompany her, a strange man could not take a woman there, and she was amused to be led, as across the road, like a child, to a shed with a door hanging from one hinge. He stood outside with his back to her private need; a delicacy that would have made The Table laugh, if it could have seen.

When she came out he drew up his shoulders in distaste for a moment and pinched in his nostrils as he breathed. This’s a dirty place. Said it again, a judgment of some kind, not a passing observation on the concrete-rimmed hole in the ground over which she had balanced herself.

Well I feel better … anyway it’s cleaner than a seat where everyone’s been on the throne. Of course it’s easier for you guys, we women lack the appropriate attachment, I suppose there’s always the risk that I could have fallen in.

Come. We must take coffee.

He does not like this sort of claim by intimacy, this manner of talk doesn’t come well from a woman one makes love to. A woman who was not even considered to be for him.

She was not aware that she had offended his sensibilities but she once again took and squeezed his hand while they sat at a little tin table outside the shop and drank two small glass cups of coffee. I’m here, I’m here. We’re here.

He sees that this — the first cup of coffee at the EL-AY Café, the love-making in her bed, the wild decision to come to this place, this country, from which she could not be dissuaded, even — yes — the marriage he then had no choice but to insist on — all this was another of the adventures she prided herself on being far enough from her father’s beautiful house always to be ready for. But how ready, now, for what is at the end of the bus ride.

They had a bride for him. Of course. Since he was sixteen or seventeen years old there had been a girl marked out. Even before, perhaps; there was a little one all skinny elbows and knees who swung her plait among the children he played with and later she was recognizable, mournful-eyed to attract attention, in the group of girls past puberty. But that one would be out of the way, by now, he had been away too long — there had been refuges other than under the belly of a car, in other parts of the world where he was unwelcome. Girls are married off young in this place that the innocent, this foreign wife thrown against him by the swaying of the bus, called his home: home, you’re home! Her adventure wiped out, for her, the anguished weeks of effort to avoid being relegated to this return. But the lurch and retreat of her soft body against his brought a tenderness in irrelevant distraction, he liked plumpness in a woman, the flesh that takes in the sharp edges and splinters of a man’s fate. This Julie who was not for him had just the right amount of flesh for solace. There it was, a gentle weight every now and then, comforting against his side. He did not know what he was thinking; he did not want to think about whatever it was, lurching his mind this way and that, along with the efforts of the overloaded bus to stay on the road.

He had prepared them; or warned them. He was coming back and it was not as the successful son who had made a better life, the Western life of television version, bringing them a share of it in his pockets and in his person, but as a reject, with nothing but a wife — a foreign woman.