Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

Maryam, in her sadness at all these symbols of parting, was happy for the couple: Wedding presents, she said. Everything in the life of this brother and the woman he mysteriously had had the good fortune to find for himself was differently timed, different from what she knew or could expect within the family.

The whole street that, vision awake and asleep, Julie had in her mind, having taken the way past the same parked motorbike against the same fence, the same music coming from the same windows, the same veiled grandmother talking to herself on the same peeling leather-covered chair, to the path’s end in the desert, must have been roused by the high volume of chatter in the to-and-fro from the kitchen as the women of the house, of whom she was one, and the guest wives wove past one another with a balance of laden dishes, and every voice rose with the stimulation of feasting. The human cries in expression of their occasion must have sounded out beyond the stump of last dwelling-place abandoned to the sand, wavered to be lost in the desert as the calls of the muezzin were and the cries that she had been told were of a pack of jackals in expression of their occasions where they roved, far off, at night. Then the bowls and plates stood around emptied of all except some leavings of an ingredient not to someone’s taste, here, and the juice swimming from some succulent dish devoured, there; and Maryam — it was she who had asked her employer’s wife for the loan of some discs — set dance music on Khadija’s CD player carried in, invading with decibels of its own. There was new laughter: what was this? It was music from the country where Ibrahim and his wife were going, its confident pulse, its dominant rapping voice shouting down all others. The old people sat calmly undistracted; the shoulders of the young moved irresistibly to the beat. She whispered something he couldn’t catch. I said, it’s great that people can get lit up without drink or something to sniff or shoot up. Come on — let’s dance.

No — not here, men and women don’t dance together — not in front of parents, no.

The lively shoulders of the brothers were revealing a familiarity of body with a mode of pleasures they must have learnt in forbidden places. It was a fine night. Later they sat talking under the awning at the back of the house while the women washed dishes and re-created the events of the party with the supplement of gossip and anecdotes about the departed guests. On a final look-around for dirty plates, she was alone in the family room: the empty sofa where the mother had her place. She happened to glance out of a window; there, at the gate, a summons, sat the dog. She went to the kitchen and, unnoticed, retrieved a handful of scraps. It was late; the street was deserted. She held out her hand, but the dog wouldn’t approach, she should have known by now, it would never come to her. That was all it had, in its hunger: its dignity that can’t be understood. She went through the gateway and put the food down in the dirt; it had its eyes familiarly on her, unmoving. She turned her back and went into the house. From the window she now saw the dog come to the food and eat.

There were final, retreating sounds and voices of everyone going to bed in this house that was not large enough yet accommodated each in his and her place, home. Even a lean-to.

The wedding presents were on the bed and the floor, lying or propped anywhere.

They laughed to one another.

Looks like a pawn-shop, remember, near the Café.

It was a nice old Jew who kept it. One time I had to take my watch there, until the end of the week when the garage paid.

What on earth to do with this? — She lifted the lamp by its bright metal petals, exaggerating its weight in the effort.

Khadija. Give it to her. She is collecting things like that for the fine house she’s going to make my brother buy for her. But some we will take of course.

Of course; was he thinking of the Koran, beautiful edition, a kind of family bible; the one she had sent for, the translation she read, was humbly mass-produced. But not the brass trays. He could not get the brass trays into the canvas bag. And what place would there be for such things that belonged here.

In America.

The kind gift of these strong flower-perfumes; to permeate everything you take away. Her attention wandered to the suitcase; elegant suitcase Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Danielle had chosen: waiting there. Tiredness rose to her head, the lean-to held the heat of the day. She pushed the window wide as it would go and there (like the dog) was the splendid night, waiting. She gave way to an impulse to let him in, into something she had not before, the kind of impulse — indiscretion? but he is her lover, her discovery — she used to give way to after too many drinks or too many joints in her old life. Let’s walk a while in the desert, it’ll be cool. The stars fantastic.

The desert. — His answer was to begin undressing.

Only down the street. Not far to go. As if he doesn’t know, he was born here, this is his place, not mine.

Let’s sleep. It’s late, who wants to go out there. Anywhere. Let’s sleep.

He stood before her as he had done every night in the doll’s house shed of his grease-monkey overalls like a prince freed of the spell cast upon him.

Whether she dreams or whether a streaming profusion of thought was what she decides she must have dreamt, does not much matter. On the eve of moving out of some tentative anchorage it is either way the natural return of comparison, attempting the matching, somehow fitting together images, years, days, moments. The relative duration of these may be reversed in their significance. The moment is longer than the year. Whether this is a raided store of the subconscious or a wakeful night — when so-called dreams are recounted to yourself in the morning, how much is being invented in the urge to find the coherence between the conscious and subconscious; that must exist; is unattainable? Must be found. And if it could be found — there would be certainty. Of what? What does that mean? Of why you live as you do. And how that ought to be. No rules, not those of The Suburbs or even (not any more!) those no-rules of The Table — the elusive coherence is what there would be to go by — something of what is known grandly as the truth. But avoid big words, for Chris’ sake, for the Prophet’s sake. Well, the individual truth. Nobody else’s.

The stream of vision, thoughts, re-creation has a kind of narrative of its own; the desert is a good place for it to relate itself. On the terrace in California (which, like the child’s ship, she had never seen except in prototype in the media) there are assembled the guests of Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sundays, Danielle and her mother; or Danielle-and-her-mother one and the same. Men beside a sauna (sauna! where does that detail come from!) are talking about winnings and losses at Black Jack and buying into the Future on the stock exchange. The latest husband introduces Ibrahim to the right people, there’s the international website man who emigrated to Australia and the black lawyer turned business entrepreneur. Her mother/Danielle introduces Ibrahim/Abdu to women, bringing him forward by the hand: my son-in-law, an oriental prince (as The Table, she knew, used to laugh about her pickup behind her back) in Gucci shoes. Armani pants and Ralph Lauren shirt Danielle’s bought him, his beauty is an exotic dish to sample along with the pool-side lunch. He’s still wearing his old elegant scarf round his neck. All that is left of him. Whatever he was, had been, is? Sliding himself out from under the vehicle, sitting in silent judgment upon us at The Table, flung upon his back on the bed in the cottage, now carefully repacking the canvas bag in the lean-to. What was it she’d read. There was a poet’s novel, she didn’t remember the title or the writer, The Table poet had given her, insisted she must read — something in it was dredged up now its time came to be understood: for her to understand what she had done. ‘I was occupied in picturing him to myself; I had undertaken the task of imagining him.’ But he is himself. Nobody’s task. Tell it to the desert; that is safe. Each time she faced the desert from the stump of a wall and then rose and walked out a way, never too far, could be the last time; meanwhile she was continuing to do what she had discovered she could do, occupied her final days as she had since she bought the two air tickets and came with him here, to his place. Right up to the date they boarded the plane, she would continue; it was her small farewell gift to the school children, leaving them with another few words of the language he had to apply himself to acquire more fluently if he were to get what he wanted where he and she were going. It was her small way of thanking the conversational tea circle and others who had come to her, for— well — their need of her.