Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

She lay on the iron bed and waited for him, gone about the imperatives of his world, as he had awaited her, gone about hers, nights in the cottage.

For a while Australia looked promising.

What’ll we do there?

Plenty. A country with opportunities, all kinds. Developing. It will be good, for you, you know, very much like your home place.

She shook her head, laughing. I’ve left that home place.

Julie went along with him to someone who had connections with someone else who knew the Canberra representative in the capital, to give particulars of her own background that might count favourably; wife a citizen of a fellow Commonwealth country, legal and fiscal provenance impeccable, standard of education high.

What about those people, the man at your father’s place, that time, who was going to Australia. He was the one who was even taking his black driver with him, you remember the talk.

I’ve no idea where they are.

There was the summon of his black eyes.

Your father knows.

She raked her hair up the back of her head through splayed fingers; he stood before her as he had when he emerged from under a car in a garage: here I am.

I can’t ask my father.

His silences distressed her more than any argument between them would have, they were retreats into thoughts that barred her; he who had been refused so often had unconsciously taken on for himself the response of refusal.

She went to him where he was suddenly rummaging in the canvas bag — he had never completely unpacked, not allowed her to do it for him, it was there ready for departure from this place, his home, standing week after week, month after month, in the lean-to room. She bent over him, her arms going around his waist and her cheek against his bare back. To her, the essence of him, the odour of his skin, overcame his silence and received her. She wanted to say, I will do anything for you, but how could this be formulated when she had shown there was something she could not?

It wouldn’t do anything for us except humiliate us. He’d say no, he wouldn’t even think of embarrassing his colleague, his corporate mate, accepted in a country in high standing … expecting him to recommend some immigrant he’s seen once at a lunch party and who was the husband of a daughter whose father had told her she must go to hell in her own chosen way — those were my father’s lovely farewell words to me!

I wrote the name of the place they were going to. Somewhere in here, it is. Perth, it was Perth. I think so… a bit of paper …

The bit of paper was not found. Without the reference from Perth the processes of application continued, the periods of waiting while documents went back and forth.

Entry to Australia was not granted.

Julie was confusedly angry. Apparently with the Australians; with herself for not having been able to ‘do anything’ for him that — in fact, in contradiction — would have been unlikely to have made any difference.

He kept contingency plans for the next country, concurrently with every application that failed. They have enough trying to keep out others from the East, they don’t need people like me. That’s all. That’s it.

In the meantime.

Waiting generates a pace of its own; routine, that is supposed to belong to permanence, forms out of the fact that in the meantime there is nothing else to be done. Ibrahim takes the old car the Uncle has lent — given — them and goes to the Uncle’s vehicle workshop in the morning, Julie has classes in English at Maryam’s employer’s house and at a school— word-of-mouth makes more claims on an apparent skill or gift she didn’t know she had. In the family house Maryam has gathered her sister Amina, who has just given birth, and Khadija, wife of the son missing at the oil fields; they and others come unobtrusively to join the exchange, picking up Julie’s language, Julie picking up theirs, under a torn awning at the back of the house that stretches to an oleander whose pink flowers are thick with dust, like a woman who uses too much powder. There is no palm tree. The shade is thin and the shifting of light across the faces, Julie’s and theirs, is a play upon what each does not know, in unfamiliarity, and is beginning to have revealed, in glances of intuition about the other. Maryam has become almost fluent, or Julie has become quicker at understanding what the girl is getting at in the locutions and inevitable substitutions of one English word for another. Maryam insists that Khadija is the one who can impart their language to Julie far better than she can, Khadija comes from the capital, she finished school ‘all the way’. It is not just the young girl’s inarticulacy in the foreign language that is the reason for this advocacy; everyone in the family knows, even Ibrahim’s wife has seen, that Khadija is in a state of frustration which swings from being found weeping in a corner (the one reserved for the mother’s prayer mat, at that) to angry imprecations against her husband, a son of the house. Ibrahim calls her, privately to his wife, that crazy woman. She shouts at my brother for being dead, perhaps he is dead, God knows. Maryam’s delicate way of wanting to help her sister-in-law is to attempt to distract her by recognizing her superiority and flattering her into the obligation to use it to help someone else: their new sister-in-law, Ibrahim’s wife. — I tell Khadija, she is lonely without our language.—

Julie repeated this to him.

Isn’t that original? Maryam’s such an unusual girl, it even comes out in her broken English. She’s right about Khadija, though. Khadija never looks at me, you know she’s somehow haughty, but she’s listening and then she corrects me, I’m really learning pronunciation from her. Talk to me. You’ll see. We must use your language together …

He was back from the Uncle’s workshop and had fetched the water his mother heated for him. The tin tub was kept ready in the lean-to; he would not allow Julie to fetch water: the other women in the house smiled to see him carry the bucket, women’s work; his mother kept her face set against the spectacle, turned away from him. He might indeed be away; one of his exiles where he could not be placed in her mind, only in a biological awareness of him that circulated in her blood, pumped through the heart.

What are the names — I don’t know, the, the … you know … the love words… I’d like to hear them. You’ve never said them to me …?

We must talk English. I need to speak English. I must speak English with you if I am going to get a decent job anywhere. I can be able to study some more there. Only with English. He tipped the water to the tub.

Scrubbing at himself as he crouches he feels the greasestains of engine innards, the dirt-coating of tools blackened under his nails, as if all over his body, the condition of his life she has never known, how could this one, who had taken a fancy to him in this state he must escape from, ever know. And he is aware that he is in dialogue with himself in the language she now has taken a fancy to learn, no use to her, to them, where they would go. But what use — cruelty — to tell her that in the life she’s decided for herself, following him, nice accomplishments are a luxury. Ramadan was approaching. Who would have thought I’d still have her in this place, we’d still be here then. The fine suitcase not gone from where she’s pushed it away under the bed, her adventure not over, we make love on that poor iron bed and I please her, my God how I please her. And no visas for me.

He told her it was of course not necessary that she should fast. With his father and the rest of the family, he would: because of his mother.