Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

With the family and the whole village, wasn’t that so?

Why should she be the exception? The only one. Lonely without the language. He ought to be able to understand; here, here in his home, she was what he had been at The Table in the EL-AY Café with her friends, at the terrace lunch party to bid farewell to the couple and their driver welcomed by Australia. Of course I’ll fast.

You’ll make yourself ill. To be without water is terrible. Don’t think only, no food; food is nothing, nothing, not like water. Believe me.

Rubbish, my love! I can do with losing some padding, I eat too much at these family meals, I’m getting a fat backside, look.

Another adventure.

He believes she may never learn; or perhaps never have to learn the rules of survival, always has all choices open to her.

Against the rusty complaints of the iron bedstead under love-making only half-unclothed she murmured, taking up an unconcluded subject, I’m all the way with you. A banal phrase from The Table, but all she had.

The pace of waiting transformed completely. Reaction to the span of the Ramadan day was exactly like the reaction of body and mind to the time-change on arrival in a country whose hours are far behind or ahead of the one departed from. The same vague swaying sensation of seeing surroundings through a distorting lens, not really unpleasant, a lazy resistance against drooping eyelid muscles, the consciousness saying, let me sleep, shut out the light, do not answer the vacuum sucking at the stomach: satisfy me, it’s the hour. And the strange surprise: the nights now were cold; the picture-postcard place was one of perpetual heat; there had been no Northern Hemisphere season of winter in that desert. She missed the pre-dawn meal for which there was really no designation, it is the meal, ultimate sustenance; she could not goad herself sufficiently awake to ingest. Thought and reaction slowed while the house was a murmuring hive of women at prayer and the men were at the mosque. However they occupied the other periods of the day, the men of the family kept to themselves elsewhere in male company. Julie did not expect to see Ibrahim until they returned after sunset. Sometimes the women visited one another, gathered at this neighbouring house or that. The mother saw her son’s wife leave in the company of Maryam, Amina, Khadija and the children for a cousin’s house; tranquilly watching from her sofa. After a while, she went to her place of prayer. An hour or more passed before she returned to the sofa in the deserted family room, and recognizing, as always, the gait and weight of his footsteps, heard her son unexpectedly return. She rose, going to him as he quietly entered. They met for a moment silently; in their faces each the likeness of the other. Then the tone of her voice, meant only for him, held the cadence of the prayers that had filled her afternoon, as a passage of music continues to sound in the ears: —Are you not well, my son.—

He inclined his head towards his mother in the special gesture — submission? love? — reserved for her. With his father he had always a ready exchange, often a combat of controlled disagreement between them. With the mother there often seemed hardly need for words. A pause. — I don’t know … no, just tired. — He looked towards the lean-to door and away again.

Between them was knowledge of the taboo, to be observed absolutely, that a husband and wife must not retire together to their bedroom during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when any intimacy between men and women is forbidden.

— Your wife is with Maryam and the others at Zuhra’s.—

The gesture of the inclined head towards his mother, again.

Working with cars and heavy trucks and all the time back, back to those foreign offices in the capital planning to go away. When would he ever take care of himself.

— You need rest.—

No need for either to remark that when the women came back he would hear and leave the lean-to before his wife might enter. Mother and son sat a few minutes together before she returned to her place of prayer.

He went to the lean-to — and there she was, Julie. He stayed himself in the doorway, then pulled the ill-fitting door carefully closed behind him.

You left the other men?

He could have said, You left the other women. He gave his wife his smile, that of himself which was for this one: for her. I’m tired.

So was I. They’re sweet, but the chatter — it gets to be like being caught in an aviary.

He kicked off his shoes and, a moment’s hesitation, doffed the embroidered cap held with a clip on the thick hair of his crown, he lay down on the bed, an obedient child sent to nap. You need rest. She lay beside him, their bodies not touching. Perhaps she knew of the taboo, Maryam might have told her; maybe not. It seemed a long time; neither slept nor spoke.

She felt desire rising in her and unfolding, thickening those other lips of hers, overwhelming the lassitude of hunger and the drought of thirst. And she was ashamed; she knew that sexual acts, like other forms of indulgence, were forbidden during these dedicated days, though this abstinence proved to add deferred excitement to love-making in the nights. Her hand went out to assure herself that it would only seek his in the aspect of love that is companionship, but it encountered bewilderingly his penis raised under his clothes. She withdrew the hand swiftly. She didn’t know where to place it in relation to herself after the contact. Again some kind of measure of time passed at this pace that was unlike any other. They turned to one another in the same moment, and he divested her of her disguise of clothes and she divested him of his. But she was the one who put the palm of a hand on his breast to stay him, thinking of the complaining springs of the iron bedstead, and lay down on the floor to receive him.

There was water in the jar they kept beside the tin tub. They washed each other off themselves; maybe her infidel’s guilty illusion of cleansing absolution. But he silently dressed, pinned the embroidered cap on his crown, and left. His mother was not in her place on the sofa. She must have been still at prayer, but she would have known, even from the disturbance in the air of the house — made by his body, alone of anyone else’s, the passage of her son’s presence — that he had recovered his forces and gone to rejoin the men.

Women and children came back, high tide of the house’s life over-running its secret streams. Maryam was asking— Has Julie gone out again?—

— She was with you.—

— Oh she didn’t stay long, she left to go home.—

Maryam called softly at the lean-to door with her usual one-knuckle tap.

— Yes? I’m coming.—

The sound of the foreign voice choked the mother with a strangle of shock.

There, there in the bedroom. Before her son came away from the men, before she told him his wife was with the other women, she herself, the mother, was alone in the house, for him — the woman had come back, unheard in the concentration of prayer, the alcove of devotion, and she was in that bedroom all the time.

There. Fear and anger hastened breathing to gasps. Amina and Maryam were alarmed by the heaving of the mother’s great breast; what was it, a heart attack? Her outspread hand erased them rather than waved them away; the day-long deprivation of water, the sun was setting, she would drink deeply, that is all that is needed.

At the meal to break the day’s fast her son was animated as any of the family in the pleasure of satisfying a hunger and thirst unique to the time-frame of Ramadan, the reward of abstention from all indulgence.

The mother did drink deeply. Not only of water, but of the shame and sin of what he had done: her son; she could not look at this beloved face, as if she would see it horribly changed, only for her — others were still seeing him handsome and full of grace — into corruption and ugliness. And that face, since she had bequeathed her own features to him, would also be her own.