Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

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.

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.

She wanted to buy sandals like the ones his sister-in-law Khadija wore so they went to look for the shoemaker who might have them. How get lost in a village he must have known, roaming every turn and twist, as a boy! Landing at empty lots, abandoned workshops, they didn’t find the shoemaker but in this part of the village she saw as a ruin but was the normal state of lassitude in the extremes of poverty, there was no demarcation between what was the thoroughfare and the shacks where goats were tethered and women squatted in their black garb like crows brought down wounded — suddenly he had to swerve to avoid a dead sheep lying bloated in a shroud of flies. Now she was appalled. Ah poor thing! Why doesn’t someone bury it!

His foot on the accelerator made the violent pressure of an about-turn, churning up stones and sand.

He lies like a corpse and a fly lands on his forehead.

Dead sheep. Rotting.

He is ashamed and at the same time angrily resentful that she is seeing it (over again, he sees her), it will be an image of his country, his people, what he comes from, what he really is — like the name he has come back to be rightfully known by. Not for her; no, that was it.

Often he was away all day. He left early, for the capital. Things to do there; family matters, she was resigned to suppose: he was back home. The family was a graph of responsibilities to be traced, a tree not of ancestry but the complexity of present circumstances. There was the question of the sister-in-law living in the house, wife of the elder brother who was away over the frontier at the oil fields and whose earnings transferred to support his wife and children had for months failed to arrive from the agency in the capital. There was some problem over the father’s right to a portion of profit from a small rice crop owned by a collateral; no lawyer in the village to regulate these disputes? No. Responsibilities were expected of the return of a son experienced in the ways of a world outside. There was no suggestion that she should accompany him, these were not occasions to explore the city, what was the sense of her hanging about in queues before officialdom.

She rationed to herself the books provided in the elegant suitcase. Might be some time before she and he decided what they would do, their project (the vocabulary of her public relations period slipped in, like an accent discernible in a second-language speaker) — what a new life, here, was going to be.

A child gentle as a moth came in to the lean-to and stood watching her read.

The second time, the child sat down on the floor, so quiet that even her breath was no intrusion. Then the child brought with her the young woman who spoke a little English.

He had made the list.

Maryam — my little sister’s what do you call it, a domestic — she works in a house like my Uncle’s. And my sister Amina, who’s living here with her children, I don’t know what her husband is doing now — what work, if there is any. Ahmad, the tall brother, kills animals for a butcher, you can smell it when he comes in. That water you see being boiled— it’s what my mother always prepares for him to wash himself. The other one, that’s Daood, he is the coffee-maker in a café. My brother Zayd, Khadija’s husband — they say there’s no news, don’t know what’s happening with him. My small brother Muhammad is still at school, he sells cheese to the houses for a shopkeeper, walking everywhere. There, that is my family. Their professions.

It must have been the young sister’s day off — Friday, yes, Julie had seen her prostrate, praying beside her mother that morning. The book was put aside and they began to talk, bridging hesitancy with gestures — Julie, with mime — and laughter at each other’s attempts at being understood. Her Ibrahim had taught her nothing of the language, dismissing even the conventional polite exchanges. They’ll get it although you say good evening and thank you very much. But this young sister seemed to enjoy having the foreigner repeat these banalities become achievements, correcting the awkwardness of a throat producing unfamiliar sounds and lips shaped to expel them. In turn, the young woman slowly arranged the sequence of her English words, and waited attentively to hear of her mistakes. For the meal after midday prayers the child put her hand, a delicate frond of fingers, in Julie’s and led her along with Maryam to where in a room with no defined purpose the women of the house cooked food for everyone on two spirit burners — that feast on the return of the son from seeking his fortune must have come from the Uncle’s house. Julie wanted to help with washing dishes in the tin basins (the flowered ones she’d seen in the market); the ethics of the EL-AY Café did not allow oneself to be waited on except in a restaurant. But the women crowded about to prevent her from so much as putting her hands in water. The mother stood apart; it must have been her direction — from her son? — that this bride he had brought as that fortune from the other world could not be expected to take on what was the lot of women.