Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

Maryam is such a bright girl.

Yes? He really does not know her; she was a child when first he went wherever it was he could pass immigration.

She says she wants to study. Doesn’t seem to know quite what — be a doctor, secretary in a company — glamourized careers she sees on television, for sure. But she is so hungry to learn. Why can’t she have the chance? Why should she be a nursemaid or whatever it is. She has a brain. You somehow got to the university.

Doesn’t she tell you she’ll be married next year. It has been arranged with the son of my father’s friend, the commissioner of police. The son is a policeman. You haven’t seen — they tell me he’s posted somewhere else. She will go there.

Julie echoes his customary conclusion: So that’s it.

She will be a wife. My mother — you can’t talk to her so how can you know. My mother is a very clever woman. She has a brain, as you say.

Oh I see that. It’s there in her face.

But you don’t know how she fought with everyone for education, that girl, forced her father to let her go to school to learn to write and read the Koran. In those days she was the only girl among the boys there. She could read newspapers and books no other girl could. She could say whole parts of the Koran — by heart, is it? Many verses. She still can. But it was arranged, she was married. And here she has been in this house giving us birth, feeding us, boiling water to clean us.

Julie could not understand the hostility in him at such times and could not know that he hardly understood it: whether it was against the bonds of a life he had set himself passionately adrift from, the sorrow that his mother’s life was, to him, and that he failed to change — and now; look at his mother — what would she have been, this image of dignity, all that she had endured and controlled, put down in the streets between the garage backyard and the company of the café table! Or was this animus against her —the tourist who like all tourists didn’t ever know what it was she really was looking at. The sense — the strength —his, in the possession of her, had been in the chance that she, her connections, what she was, would have obtained for him in her country what he could not attain. His animus the protection he must take to guard against that thing, luxury, people who could afford it called love — he found himself yielding to feel, for her. That would be his weakness — the day when she packed the elegant suitcase and went away, this adventure worn thin, as it will. Him the loser, yet again. He’s not for her. Papers refused.

He did not tell her that from the first day what he was doing when he left early on a morning for the capital was seeking out every contact, every strategy of wily ingenuity that could be got out of such contacts, to apply for visas for emigration to those endowed countries of the world he had not yet entered and been deported from. Australia, Canada, the USA, anywhere, out of the reproach of this dirty place that was his.

No point in raising hopes that might not succeed in time: before the adventure was over and the elegant suitcase packed for the EL-AY Café, and the beautiful terrace of her father’s house, although she didn’t care to call that home.

He is back helping out in his Uncle’s vehicle repair workshop.

Ibrahim ibn Musa.

The processes of applying for permission to enter someone else’s country from this one are numerous and set no definite period for their conclusion. The verdict — yes or no, and under what conditions — takes even longer. The local consular representative of the country concerned, after the applicant has managed to get past counter clerks and sit before him, has to send all relevant documents back and forth to the Ministry in that country; they slip to the bottom of a pile, get lost in the interstices of a filing cabinet, are wiped out by computer failure, and the process has to start over again. There is no use asking for reasons; and then there are new questions from the Ministry, requiring still further documentation, to and fro. And underlying all this that is taking place openly on stamped forms and computer screens there are other measures, anything and everything that can be tried to wriggle under power-lines of bureaucracy, and that have succeeded, it is legendary, the odyssey of emigration, for some, while failing — he follows their experience every day, with compatriots at a coffee stall — for others.

She has been only the Siren to his Ulysses. Whereas in her country it had been up to her to importune the influential and engage lawyers etc. in the contest with the bureaucracy of authority — an unsuccessful diversion, even if attractive— in this place, this situation back here, he is the one who must have the know-how, or somehow acquire it. What had served him before, when he managed to get some kind of dubious entry to a country, might not — did not — work now; the equivalent national humanitarian symbols of the Lady With The Upheld Torch, like her, no longer welcome but use the Light to frisk each applicant blindingly for possible connections with international terrorism — people fighting their own foreign ideological battles on other nations’ soil, or carrying in their body fluids the world’s latest fatal disease. This country which claimed him by his birth, his features and colour, his language, and the Faith that he had to fill in on forms although he did not know if his mother’s son was still a Believer — this country was well known to have a high rating as a place of origin from which immigrants were undesirable.

She, his foreign wife, was the right kind of foreigner. One who belonged to an internationally acceptable category of origin. When he was simply handed a single form for her application for a visa for any of the countries he favoured, he had now to tell her what his absences in the capital were about.

I started right away to get us out of here.

But where to. She was reading down the form as she spoke. What sort of country.

Does she still believe in choice. But he gave her his slow rare smile that he knew she was, always, moved to coax from him. Any one we can have.

All right for her. For him, her husband, if other ways were to be followed where official ones were going to be a no-no, these cost money. She had no scruples about this so long as bribes could be managed, here, without danger to him; the only reason why this course hadn’t been resorted to back in her country was the warning of the lawyer that he would find himself in more trouble. There were the tourist dollars she had brought with her; her only hesitation was how would he and she continue to contribute food and other necessities — things his mother certainly needed — if the money ran out? The Uncle wasn’t paying him, at present — apparently the old car and free fuel were regarded as compensation for having him back under vehicles. This time the fleet of the provincial administration and now as a mechanic genuine-trained in a big city far from us! — This was the Uncle’s bonhomie that, once she had Ibrahim translate for her, she began to recognize in its frequent repetition.

We’ll be gone before then.

He was fixed in determination as on something palpable, as he stripped himself of jeans and T-shirt. The designer jeans were oil- and dirt-stained now, there were no trade unions with rules for the protection of workers, the kind of business the Uncle owned so profitably did not supply overalls. His determination was an awesome possession she had never seen, never needed to be called forth either in the life of her father’s suburb or the sheltered alternatives of her friends. Never known in herself — well, perhaps when she stood in the cottage before him with two flight tickets instead of one.