Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

It was understood: Maryam has been told by the mother to inform me that she expects me to produce a child.

It must be passed off lightly. — There are plenty of grand-children, Khadija’s, Amina’s just had another, now you will have babies too.—

— My mother thinks of a child from Ibrahim.—

She glides out of contact with his back, out of the bed, awake very early. Perhaps it’s a new habit left over from the hours of Ramadan. She puts on jeans and a shirt over bare breasts, picks up sandals, slips out of the house with them in her hand. He’s always saying, as if drily repeating an adage, you can only live in the early morning in this place, his home, but he never wakes to do so — during the ritual rising before dawn one of the brothers had to come and thump on the lean-to door. She squats beside the empty blue urn to wriggle her toes into the sandals. It is true that the air is a pure element to walk out into, as different from the element of midday as it is to immerse oneself, move from dry land to water. The rih has sandpapered the shapes of habitations, the sky; there is the stillness of perfect clarity. She takes a walk, just down the street, accompanied for a few minutes by one of those cowed dogs who know they are despised in this village. Although she has not threatened it, it turns from her and runs away. She has come to the sudden end of the street: there is the desert. Its immensity has put a stop to the houses, the people: go no farther with your belching cars, your bleary lights in the majesty of darkness, your street vendors and broadcast babble; go no further in your aspirations.

There was a clump of masonry a few yards out into the sand, the remains of something that had been built and fallen down, there, interred. She began to make for it and there was yet another element entered; the chill of the desert, night-cooled sand sifting through the straps of the sandals to lave her feet. She sat on the broken remnant of wall and looked— if it can be said the eyes are looking at no fixed object, no horizon to be made out. The sands are immobile. She tried to think it was like gazing out of the window of a plane into space, but then there is always a wisp of cloud that comes across and creates scale. After a while there was an object— objects — which quickly drew into focus, black marks, spots before the eyes? — and as they grew became a woman enveloped in black herding a small straggle of goats. She came only near enough into vision for a staff she was wielding to be made out, taking her goats in another direction. In search of pasture. Here? This space undisturbed by growth, even while you lift and place your feet it obliterates where they fall and covers their interruption as they pass on. The spots before the eyes were gone. She suddenly thought of a glass of water, wanted it. And the need was strange. When you thirst, in the sands, water takes on a new meaning: it’s an element that has no place. She sat a while, hadn’t put on her watch, and then walked back to where the street began, with the feeling of being seen off, although there was nobody. The street was coming to life. The electronic call to prayer wound out from the direction of the mosque and from one of the houses there was the sprightly beguiling voice of a radio commercial. The vendor of fritters was coming towards her and she found, as she hoped, some coins in her jeans and bought a few, pleasingly warm in their wisp of paper, to her hand, as the cool of the sand had been to her feet.

What is this.

He gestured at the sight of her, up and dressed. He lay flushed with sleep under his dark-honey-coloured skin, black shining eyes shadowed in blue hollows, melancholy or erotic. Here I am.

Here to come back to from a desert just on the doorstep.

Out to buy fritters. Look, still hot. She waved the fragrant disks at him.

Ibrahim was shaving. The hot water came from a kettle he had bought that worked off an extension cord from the house handy Ahmad had rigged up, which also served for the fan he’d bought, and the lamp for her to read by — each appliance could be used only when the others were disconnected, and there were hours when the village electricity failed: cold water, darkness. The paraffin burners were the resort of the household; nobody went hungry, the slaughterer brother had his bath water heated for him by his mother in the customary way, and Ibrahim’s wife, inducted to women’s work now, waited patiently for her turn to fetch his; oil lamps turned the house into a shadowy cave of shelter.

He opened his mouth wide, high and taut, and shaved at the corners under the two glossy tresses of moustache. Open on his beautiful teeth, this was like a variation of his rare and awaited smile. He raised eyebrows in enquiry: she was watching him?

They wonder why we don’t have a baby.

He goes on shaving the delicate area. The aura of his presence that she has known so well from the first day, contracts in withdrawal; she’s come to know that, too.

Who wonders that.

Your mother wants a child from you.

She has not said it, but he sees, he knows, she is suddenly taken with the idea. Another adventure.

What do we want with a child. We are not Zayd and Suliman and the lot. We will be gone. What a way to make a start, you sick, giving birth, a little baby to look after.

Is she reproaching him through his mother.

Are you crazy? And the moment spoken, he feels its cruelty stab back at him. He throws the razor onto the towel, holds his breath and plunges his face to the bowl of steaming water. When he lifts his head, she has taken up the razor and offers the towel. As he dries his face it is as if the whole exchange has also evaporated. Everything as before, as every morning in the existence of waiting; suspended. He goes off to help out at the vehicle workshop that, within the support of the family system, provides a little money (he’s now being paid) and the use of a car. She has come to be accepted as one of the women who share household tasks, and she makes use of her education to teach English to schoolchildren and anyone else in the village — word has gone round, there are more and more who would like to improve their chances in what (he has said) is the world. Sometimes, recalling public-relations-speak over a cellphone which used to be attached to her like the tag on the leg of a homing pigeon, she thinks it’s the first time that expensive education has been put to use.

The Bedouin woman can be seen only in the early hours. (Maryam, when asked as a matter of casual curiosity from a foreigner, says she must be Bedouin, they have their tents and their goats somewhere out there.)

She goes to sit on the stump of masonry in the hours when he is at the Uncle’s workshop, the father of the family away on the benches outside coffee shops where he conducts whatever it is occupies him, the brothers at work and the children in school. The women — except Maryam, cleaning her employer’s house — are cooking, watching television or praying— she understands: prayer is the only form of rest his mother allows herself.

No-one would notice her absence. Although it is not proper to go about to the market or shops unless accompanied by one of the sisters or, at least, a couple of children, just to the end of the street apparently does not count. Neighbours, who drop in and out of the family house to visit, are accustomed to her presence among them and greet her if they see her pass; a corner of curtain may be lifted, dropped again: she cannot be going anywhere or to do anything of interest; this direction of the street ends in the desert.

She wears an old khaki hat from camping days with the EL-AY Café crowd which fortunately she dropped into the elegant suitcase when looking around for what just might be useful, before she left the cottage and all non-essentials. The heat tends to collect beneath the dark green cotton brim, adequate protection where she came from, but not here; when she reached her place on the relic of a habitation she would take out of her shirt pocket a sleazy scarf bought in the market and drape it over the hat to her shoulders — people here knew that the sun was an enemy not to be exposed to as a sensuous benefice on Cape Town beaches. The Bedouin hidden in the wisdom of her black wraps was safe from melanoma, alone with her goats in the desert.