Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

She certainly did not know there would be another family gathering the week after his decision was made known. She was aware he must have told his mother of it before he told her — but that might have been because he believed she, his wife, surely must have known, from the moment the announcement was made by the Uncle, his decision was a foregone conclusion. Only in the dark had he come to the possibility of her betrayal — You thought I would take it.

The decision had been conveyed to the Uncle by his mother. It appeared that such a decision could not properly be made by a young man on his own. He had ignored the due process of discussion within the family of whatever reasons there could possibly be for a rebuff — an insult, considering the Uncle’s position in the family, in the whole community— of this nature.

The story of the amazing action of a young man from a poor family like their own, who had taken himself off to foreign countries and made nothing of himself there, come home with only a foreign wife to show for it, had gone from house to house and café to market stall, wafted up to homes of the few wealthy and important people — the wife who employed a member of the family inquisitively extracted inside information from her maid, the young man’s sister, Maryam.

The BMW outside the house again. There was no question of tea and sweetmeats, or the couple preferring to occupy the lean-to. He said, we have to be there, and they were seated, a little apart from the rest of the family, when the Uncle entered and everyone rose. His greetings were less mayoral, but proper.

It had come to the Uncle’s ears that his dear sister’s son and the son of his respected brother-in-law was getting mixed up in politics. Everyone agrees that a young man must have friends to meet and talk to, a little pleasure men enjoy away from the house and the women. His self-confidence allowed him to make a joke even in this situation, but nobody tittered; the men, knowing their indulgences, of which he hinted, smoking a bit of kif and taking alcohol in a disguised bar, the women wise in not enquiring where the men went at night, and all were subdued, as if sharing some sibling guilt for the brother’s misdemeanours that went beyond these. Well — kif and whisky and even the occasional woman — the Uncle had been young himself; he did not need to say what, for his manhood, he assumed was understood. But Ibrahim— his sister’s son like a son to him — it is known, it has now become known to him, and with sorrow, mixes with a certain crowd. This comes as a shock to his dear parents, and it is for them that a senior member of the family speaks now. This young man the whole family loves is spending his time with a type of malcontents who blame everything in their lives on others — on the authorities, on the government. Everything they do not have the ability to do for themselves, work hard as the older generation, his generation (a hand flat against his own breast), was willing to do, sacrifice, for the honour of the family, raise themselves up — all this is the fault of the government. Government owes them everything. The Lord has given them what a man needs to live a good life in the Faith, their families have educated them, they can marry and bring up children in security, there are no foreigners from Europe flying flags over our land any longer — what more do they want? They want to bring down the government, aoodhu billah. That’s the evil they want. They have in their heads the ideas that set brother against brother. They want to smash everything, and they don’t know — don’t they see what is happening in those countries that have done this? — a country ends up with nothing, everything lost. The young men already have so much that we, their parents, never had. And why not? We are glad of it. From outside, from progress. Isn’t it enough to have your car and cellphone and TV. What else is really worth having out there in the world of false gods?

All he wants to say: it is mixing with this group who are dangerous, a danger to themselves, to us, to our government — they must be the sad reason for a young man giving up an opportunity that would bring advancement, comforts, everything anyone could want for a good life, eventually a high place in the community and honour to the family. This opportunity that was offered comes out of sorrow, but was a way of making something joyful result from pain, ma sha allah, some good to come to the family out of — he placed his hand on his breast, softly, now — a tragedy. Inna lillah.

There was silence in which everyone in the room was alone. The children felt it and gazed about at the grown-ups in awe. Tears were running down the composed face of the mother as some revered statues are said to shed tears on certain auspicious dates, while their features remain cast in stone or bronze.

The Uncle, her brother, had spoken seated beside her; but her son, the nephew, stood up.

— No-one in this village, in this place, has anything to do with why I cannot accept the offer you have honoured me with, Uncle Yaqub. I do not have any interest in the government. It is not going to govern me. I am going to America.—

The Uncle spoke measuredly and clearly — to her ears — in contrast with the quick speech of the young people in the family whom she found difficult to follow, probably because they spoke colloquially while she was studying the language out of primers, and those who had volunteered in the friendly exchange of languages over tea also thought it respectful of theirs to teach her only its conventional formulations.

Afterwards, Ibrahim gave her full account of what the Uncle had said. So she was able to piece together the words and phrases she had understood in the Uncle’s own voice and to correct for herself, with that echo, the paraphrase and lack of emphasis in what she was being told in the medium of Ibrahim’s English. She needed an explanation to the reference to sorrow, a tragedy, at the end, that had produced such a strong effect on everyone, she had felt it herself?

Didn’t she remember that the only son was dead? Ah yes — the heir apparent — she did, how was it?

A terrible thing. He burned in his car, an accident. And no-one says it, but it was when he had taken alcohol. Drunk.

So she understood; the reference was used to wind up with something to shame the one who was refusing bestowal of a privilege to which he wasn’t really entitled anyway. Like the other women of the house, she hadn’t known, hadn’t expected to be told every time her man was out at night, where he went and what he did; this attitude came naturally to her, from the mores of The Table at the EL-AY Café—everyone free to come and go, particularly in the code of intimacy, no-one should police another; even in the ultimate intimacy called love, monitoring was left behind with the rejected values of The Suburbs. The reference — his own — to America, which she had understood as he pronounced it evenly in his mother tongue, had brought an immediate urge of protectiveness towards him, she had wanted to get up, go to him, shield him from the pathetic humiliation he was exposing himself to before the eyes of the family, when everyone knew, everyone, how since his return, deported from one country, he was always making applications for immigration visas to other countries and coming back from the queues in the capital with a piece of paper; refusal. He was going to Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The neat file in the canvas bag was full of such documents.

To save him embarrassment, she did not refer to the pretext he had given for his refusal; she knew the real reasons. The grease-stiff overalls and the stink of fuel from which he had emerged in the garage round the block near the EL-AY Café. And perhaps he felt it was — what? — distasteful, bad luck, somehow not what should be, to fill the empty space of someone’s sorrow, occupy the place of a young man he must have known, a family sibling, as a child. He could not tell them that; he brought up a pretext nobody could believe in.