Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

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.