Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

If she denounced him to his father and brothers, brother-in-law, denounced the woman his wife to the daughters, and the daughter-in-law who would receive it as a triumph against the honour of the family?

What happened behind the closed door of the room where the wife was already lying — any woman who had lived long enough to know men and women could be in no doubt. And how at ease her son was now, the relaxation of a certain kind recognized by an old woman who had slept beside a man for many years.

How would her son be dealt with by the men of the family. The couple — what would happen to them. But she knew, she knew what would happen. Ibrahim would not take disgrace from anyone here, such edicts were bearings cast loose, their authority over sons lost in the alien authority of exile, emigration — that she knew.

Her brother. If his Uncle Yaqub were told. And of course he would be informed, the senior and most important member of the family. And he was the only one she privately could have hoped might offer help for her son to stay instead of seeking another emigration. When Yaqub was informed; what would happen.

She knew what would happen.

Her son would leave somehow, for somewhere, lost to her in the world once again.

No-one had been in the house. Only she. She had not heard — no — the woman, his wife, enter and go to the lean-to, she had been at prayer. It was only he, her son, whose presence or absence she was always aware of, coming or going. Her daughter Maryam did not know that her brother had come and gone during the afternoon, occupied a bedroom with his wife.

What would happen to her, the mother, if she spoke to no-one of what she knew — no-one.

Aoodhu billah. If she took the sin upon herself, as if she assumed the distorted visage of the beloved face only she knew was evident. Astaghfar allah. If he is disgraced, nothing will stop him. He will leave. She will lose him again. Any punishment, in sha allah , rather than that.

When one of the men lightly remarks upon her son’s disappearance from the company of the men in the course of the afternoon, she responds before he could. — He needs rest.—

She, Julie, was apprehensive about the family meal after sunset, what had she done to him; would he not — both of them not — be shamed to take part, he among the men, she among the women. But he returned from the mosque with his father, Ahmad, Daood, Amina’s husband Suliman and young Muhammad, and greeted her as if he had not seen her since morning.

The fuzzy intoxication of being awake when you were used to being asleep and to be sleeping when you were meant to be awake wore off just as the internal clock resets itself after a few days in a country across a date-line. She rose in the cold for the pre-dawn meal and the calls of hunger and thirst were a clamour only by sunset. The transformation of time-scale was complete when she remembered: back there, at The Table, friends had weeks ago seen an old year out, getting drunk, stoned; Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his Danielle had started with champagne and oysters their old life over again on a new calendar. A New Year was yet to come, as time is measured here.

I was taught time was divided by the birth of a child in a stable and the calculation B.C., A.D. that followed ever after the great event. That was time. And all the blacks had been brain-washed by missionaries and battered by settlers into co-option. So they believed it, too. Had to. Well I suppose my parents had some friends — I must have known a few other kids? — who were perhaps Jewish, but whatever rituals they had didn’t count for much with us and they came to Nigel’s Christmas and New Year bash anyway, if they were on the right social level. Muslims — we didn’t know any … but the Indian shopkeepers closed for what we said was the birthday of God’s son and the day we’d decided was a new year beginning — oh I know the cycles of the moon and the changes of season were mixed up in it, but this was the Christian cycle. The world’s just their world, to them, the Christian world.

He was sitting in the lean-to’s only chair marking with a ballpoint passages in a copy of Newsweek he had picked up somewhere when he was last in the capital for an interview with some consular visa section. The pen kept making only grooves and he scratched it fiercely into the paper to get ink flowing. Paused; to regard her.

World is their world. They own it. It’s run by computers, telecommunications — see about it here — the West, they own ninety-one percent of these. Where you come from — the whole Africa has only two percent, and it’s your country has the most of that. This one? — not enough even to make one figure! Desert. If you want to be in the world, to get what you call the Christian world to let you in is the only way.

Canada. The end of Ramadan meant for him that without offence to his mother he could take up again his way to go about applications for Canada. Two letters of recommendation (To Whom It May Concern) based, probably calculatedly and correctly on an unknown’s marriage to a wife with all the right provenance and papers — the wealthy American citizen mother as well as the wealthy father, cited, this time — had turned up from California. Surprise, surprise; Julie handed them over. She would not have thought Beverly — her mother — would or could have found anyone to put his name to them. The casino stepfather apparently had connections among his gambling cronies, though who knew what their signatures were worth. Anyway, Ibrahim put the letters in the file he kept of documents — applications pending, applications refused — marked in the flow of Arabic script she admired.

In another country it would be called up on a computer, not all these to keep.

He thrust the file back into the canvas bag of his possessions. Canada — there were brothers, in the village sense of community, already established; Toronto, Calgary under glittering glass-splinter snow, these frozen places might crook a finger of acceptance to the desert, where sand was grit between the teeth.

She had been allowed, presenting herself tentatively and ready to be turned away with the sisters’ usual exquisite politeness and a stare from Khadija sullenly stern in her abandonment as a wife, to take part in the cooking preparations for the feast of Eid al-fitr. For her, the end of Ramadan meant that the sisters and the children came to sit expectantly in the communal space of the house at the accustomed times for the exchange of English and Arabic.

An afternoon after Ramadan his mother was sitting among the women. She did not speak. But she was there. The die from which Ibrahim’s face was cast. A statement to be read, if only one knew how to decipher it in what endured, a bronze of being beneath flesh drawn from its fine-boned muscular moorings down round the dark elegantly-pursed mouth, creased beneath the brows, invaded by the growth of wiry hairs on the chin. All Julie could make out, in this presence, was she had gained acceptance by the respect of observing the edict that she neither eat nor drink between sunrise and sunset for thirty days, even if she did not spend those days in prayer.

Even had seduced the son again, now in his family home restored to him, in the forbidden days. Did the face of the mother conceal she knew that, as well. He’s absolved: ‘He needs rest.’

This foreign woman gives it to him.

Sometimes his mood — when he came into the room where she was among the women or in the lean-to amusing Khadija’s and Amina’s children with games unearthed from memories of Gulliver’s garden — showed that Canada was going well. Other days he would glare round at his sisters and desolate sister-in-law as if at a flock to be shooed away, or say to the children in the language he shared with them — goodbye, out, go! — play somewhere else!