Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

The father’s collateral connection came from an inner office slowly, as if the visit were something unavoidable rather than welcome. He was a foreshortened man, the compression of whose aspect created the impression of concentrated ability. The father looked loose-limbed and flabby-bellied, before him; a wordless vis-à-vis of their relative positions in a common fate. She saw that Maryam was sensitive to this graphic statement, distressed, on behalf of her father, to be reminded of what everyone knew but was not confronted with like this: he was dependent on what was hardly more than the charity of this man, for whatever his minor function in the man’s affairs might be.

Maryam caught up and held breath while greetings were exchanged. Mr Muhammad Aboulkanim showed no surprise or curiosity when the European woman wearing a headscarf was presented to him, a wife the son Ibrahim must have picked up somewhere in emigration; the wife saw that this was to make clear to the father that this patron had done for him all he could be expected to, no question of his having any interest in the affairs of his distant relative’s family — if that were some idea of bringing the woman along. But the father was accustomed to dealing in a certain dignity with rebuffs from this man as from his wife’s brother, Uncle Yaqub. He asked whether, once business was over, they could show Ibrahim’s wife how rice grows ‘in our dry country’.

Aboulkanim had the women and the father’s friend served coffee and glasses of iced water while he ushered the father to his inner office past lowered eyelids and clamped lips.

The three sat on steel-framed, jouncing chairs in the style of office furnishings fifty years ago, and Maryam replied to the secretary’s bright questions with schoolgirl obedience. The friend smoked and eyed the door of the inner office as if he could monitor whether tactics discussed all the way in the car were being pursued by the father, behind there.

Mr Aboulkanim drove them in his own car to the rice field. The father sat beside him; there was in his voice a tone that conveyed to those seated behind that his interview in the inner office had not gone badly; which was to say, nothing changed: he still had his connection.

For half-an-hour a road ignored by the desert led them as before; in vast spaces of the planet Earth like these the road is one road, not multiplied by alternatives. The father talked volubly as he had in the to-and-fro with the friend, although his patron merely grunted or cleared his throat of mucus in response, the radio was babbling news to which nobody listened, part of the smooth function of the handsome German car. In air-conditioned chill the pores on her arms contracted to goose-flesh; but Maryam pulled a little happy grimace and drew her nostrils to take in the coolness as if to store it prudently for the heat beyond the windows.

And then the road ended and there was a low cement-block building with a large efficient-looking pit before it where there were pumps and other heavy machinery whose purpose women would not know. The patron addressed Maryam with an explanation as if the other woman brought along were not there. Maryam translated softly. This is where the water is controlled and the rice is — the word she was looking for was understood: threshed. A barefoot worker, eagle-faced and blackened by the sun, stood by silently, breathing with open mouth like a patient attendant dog.

But she was gazing in concentrated distraction on what was suddenly there before her with its own-drawn close limit of horizon and dazzling density, man-high, what seemed to be meshed slender silky reeds, green, green, green. A kind of wooden walkway offered itself — dank water glancing between planks — and she turned away from the others and took it. The intoxication of green she entered was audible as well as visual, the twittering susurration of a great company of birds clinging, woven into the green as they fed; their tremble, balance, sway, passing through it continuously like rippling breeze, a pitch of song as activity, activity as song, filled her head. The desert is mute; in the middle of the desert there is this, the infinite articulacy: pure sound. Where else could that be? That coexistence of wonder. A break in the rice-canes, just at the side of the walkway; a low private glaze of fallow water. A heron awaited her there, standing; she paused and stood; the bird dipped its beak. Ringingly deafened with the music of this sphere she did not hear human voices calling to her and took her own time to make her way back.

She had kept them waiting, the patron’s eyes were hidden by sunglasses, but the set of his mouth made that clear. They were lined up as if for a photograph; indeed, it was for a photograph. The father’s friend was trying out focus with an instant-delivery camera. She was placed between her husband’s father and Maryam; then Maryam posed her just before the building on the concrete surface where rice had spilled. — Pick up, please, go on, in your hands — Maryam laughed and mimed.

She scooped a handful of slippery husks and sifted them through her fingers, smiling, the friend stepped back a pace, forward again, and the picture was taken. The coloured print came rolling out, he waved it a moment and gave it to her.

On the return journey the father and his friend included Maryam in their exchange, expansive under the influence of the lushness they had come close to, as if they had been drinking. Maryam would not let her be left out, and translated. — They’re saying it can be possible, they can buy some part where there is growing now, or look for water — what is it you say—

— Drill. Drill for water, you mean?—

— Yes, make a well. And grow.—

— Grow rice?—

— Rice, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, many things. They’re saying it can be, if they have the money.—

— You can get permission to drill a well?—

— If they had the money they can do it, even right now. They will if they had money. Just the money! — Maryam laughed, at them and herself — always it was just the money, for everything you wanted and couldn’t have.

— And they’d know how to go about cultivation — growing the rice?—

— They know, Julie, yes, oh from years — learned from Mr Aboulkanim, of course they know … only the money …—

On this journey now she was in dialogue with herself.

What’s the legal position with funds in a Trust — why hadn’t she taken more interest in learning these things about money! All very well to scorn them, turn up your nose at the bad smell, when there’s nothing you really want that you could buy with it; the second-hand car he found was fine. She had always known about that Trust — the family lawyer had told her father it was right and proper that she, the beneficiary, be informed. So she’d once signed some papers thrust in front of her. The Trust had been set up, apparently, to avoid death duties when Nigel Ackroyd Summers died and his daughter would inherit a considerable fortune from him (even if he were to leave most of his wealth to his second wife). Tax reasons — to benefit the heir, of course, lucky girl. Always tax reasons for what Nigel Ackroyd Summers does. Perhaps — there must be — some way of drawing on that money? Nearly thirty years old, living in some god-forsaken country, isn’t that a case of dire need, for a rich man’s only daughter, without waiting for anyone’s death? She remembered — summoned — a term, maybe one the lawyer had used? — pre-inheritance. If she had heard it from the lawyer, that must mean it came up theoretically, but as a possibility. So it could be done. Why not? You must write to someone— the lawyer, of course. No, to Archie. Yes, always it’s to Archie. Ask Archie to look into the principle, the possibility, with a lawyer — not my father’s, that one would be alerted to objections on behalf of his client, knowing the daughter’s reputation in the family…