Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

How do I know this place? Uncle Yaqub one day brought me here.

They laughed: to prepare the favoured nephew for the kind of life he was to be offered. The laughter was as near as she and Ibrahim had ever got to referring to that offer again.

The restaurant was air-conditioned, the temperature of some other country; the food succulent and served gracefully by young men. She remarked on this service with appreciation; silently following the waiters’ glide about tables, he saw in them likely rivals, brothers, yes, in the queue for visas. No wine, here, of course. Sorry for that.

I don’t care. Everything’s delicious — but even though it’s so elaborate, it isn’t any better than your mother makes at home.

They paid in dollars left over from the fee due at a consulate. The alley-way bazaars they passed, the street stalls— these were selling much the same sort of thing as in the village market, only more of it, and the shops displayed among tinselled robes, gold-framed mirrors and curlicued furniture familiar from the house of the Uncle and of Maryam’s employer, the even more familiar international choice of Nike boots, cellphones, TV consoles, hi-fi and video equipment. The mosques — but did she really want to see government buildings and mosques? It’s only the walls, anyway, you know they won’t let you go inside. Then they came to a cinema complex that was a fair example of such a concept anywhere. They had not seen a film since The Table had trooped together from the EL-AY Café to a Brazilian film festival at an art house. Of the film posters’ giant gaze outside this complex, most faces were unknown to her and although the names of actors were familiar to him, did not attract him. They saw a James Bond film, subtitled, his choice. If they did not hold hands as she had done with other lovers (he retained some of the sexual decorum of the village) she kept her hand on his thigh while they sat comfortably together in the dust-mote dark. If the mosque and the church have been left behind somewhere in life, the cinema can be a place of meditation. As in a place of worship, the one prostrate, forehead to the floor, the one on the knees, neither knows in what the person beside him or her is lost.

Next time he went to the capital there was no need for her to go along with him — he said. On his return in the early afternoon he did not come to his mother’s house but to the vehicle workshop, took off the tie and jacket every applicant, poor devils like himself, queueing at a consulate wore as proof of respectability, and pulled himself into the stiff mould of greasy jeans that hung on the wall; the Uncle must have his money’s worth from his ungrateful nephew, disgrace to the family. When he came home to the lean-to she was lying on the floor — he often found her reading there, studying her Arabic, stretched on her belly for coolness; now she was cleaning sand from between her toes. She looked up and saw: no news. That night she began to caress him, down the silky hair of his chest to his groin, but he did not rouse to her hand, he was tense in some other state of concentration. She had the odd vision of his mother when at prayer.

She lay angry, resentful at the officialdom, the requirements and provisos and quibbles of smug petty functionaries who had the power to induce these states of tension in him. And what for? What was it all for? The Uncle, the family, had said of that world that shut him out, didn’t even want him reduced to a grease-monkey — yes, they had said it, and at the time she had had to stifle a derisive splutter of laughter — Isn’t it enough to have a cellphone and TV? Wasn’t that more than enough of it? What else is really worth having out there in the world of false gods?

She was given the day. Maryam’s idea.

What Maryam called her ‘wish’; the father was to make one of his infrequent visits to the oasis where he had his connection with a relative who grew rice. Maryam asked that she and Julie might go with him.

Would there be no objection from the father? Perhaps he would prefer not to present the foreign daughter-in-law.

No, no, Maryam had told him Ibrahim’s wife wished to see something of the country before Ibrahim left again, took her away.

Only … she, Maryam, would have to get permission from her employer to absent herself from her daily work. Her face pleated in embarrassment of presumption at the request: —You ask her, she’ll give me the day. — So at the next conversational tea Julie told the lady of the house that she had the opportunity of a little outing (an English colloquialism for the gathering to remember) and wanted Maryam to keep her company. Permission was granted immediately.

The father borrowed his son Ibrahim’s car. Rather, it was the son who insisted on this. Julie, you can’t go driving around in his old wreck, it breaks down everywhere. Time my Uncle gave a new one my mother can be safe in, anyway.

Would be, not can.

The teacher ran a hand over his hair, with the correction; he complained she helped everyone improve their English except him, to whom it was important.

You are crazy, in this heat, the desert.

I know. I know.

Maryam did not like to tell her to cover her head for this expedition, but brought along an enveloping scarf for her as a gentle instruction rather than an indication that she should have decided to wear something adequate of her own. A man accompanied the father in the front seat, and the two young women sat at the back. — It’s all right for you? — Maryam whispered concern for comfort to be provided on her little expedition.

The two men talked all the way without pause, their language so voluble that a beginner, though making progress, caught nothing but the obeisance in sha allah and others she understood.

The road ventured out into the desert, the road parted the desert with the thin accompaniment, on either side, of lone outbreaks of small stores, repair yards of undefinable nature in their clutter of disparate wreckage, coffee stalls where men from nowhere sat and a few goats cropped among detritus of torn plastic and cigarette packs; but it was not the desert she came to herself; was received by. In passing stretches it was stony; the outcrop bones of dwellings, bones of animals and humans it had submerged, bared to the surface, like the stump of masonry where she sat on the house it had overcome. The desert withdrew from the interruption of the road; even when the road became hardly more than parallel grooves ground by the passage of vehicles in the sand that flowed over its surface. The experience of the desert she had anticipated from Maryam’s expedition was refused her.

In the name of God If God wills it

Perhaps it was the cocoon of noise which enclosed Maryam and her; the loud to-and-fro talk between the men, bound by winding plaints of car radio music that had the same cadence as their language, and the engine groan of the Uncle’s hand-me-down car. Hot, yes, if there had once been air-conditioning in the car, it didn’t work. But Maryam had a local inhabitant’s ability to rest back in the palpable heat, and she had learnt from her not to resist but to do the same.

They did not come upon the destination suddenly. At the sides of their track there glinted what might be a fragment of tin catching the glare, a shard of broken glass shining. But then there was continuity in the shine: water, shallow threads of water. And something like weeds, though not the tough flourishing wayfarer weeds in countries where there is rain. There were palms. At last. A group of camels rested on legs articulated beneath them, their heads rising like periscopes. They must have been hobbled; one struggled to stand with a lower front leg roped back at the knee to its upper half. She had forgotten how she had visualized postcard palm trees, back there. Now they came to a village only a little more formal and extensive, with its mosque, than sparse roadside occupation. The visitors were received in a palm courtyard where offices, like the image of another world (back there) entered through a television screen, had two young men seated at computers, a young woman, wearing the chador but with pursed thighs revealed by a gauzy skirt, used the intercom to announce an arrival in the seductive corporate voice.