Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

There is no last time, for the desert. The desert is always. It does not matter that she has turned and gone back up the street, buying three circles of warm fritters from the vendor as she returns to the family home, the lean-to for transients.

Out to buy fritters.

They decided together, often disagreeing and then giving in, each indulgent to the other, on what to take and what to leave behind. Some abandonments were reversed.

One of the brass trays? Just that little one. If you can squash it in at the bottom.

They regarded each other mock-questioningly a moment, laughed. With Maryam she had bought a supplementary suitcase at the market, a cardboard affair with tin locks instead of the digital combination one on the elegant suitcase. His mother, through Maryam as emissary, had provided two sets of flower-patterned bed sheets as a start, wherever they might find the next bed, and it was not possible to distribute these discreetly, like the other ‘wedding presents’ they couldn’t carry.

All right. Between my mother’s sheets, if you want.

They wrapped the family Koran like a mummy, to protect it in his canvas bag, and then discussed whether it wouldn’t be safer to have it in the cabin. She taped it once again in plastic film so that toothpaste or deodorant, which might leak under pressure changes in an aircraft, could not harm it in her overnight pouch.

What about that perfume stuff the women gave you. You like that.

No … no, Maryam and Khadija have it, I know from experience what can happen with perfume … and those phials don’t have proper stoppers. I wouldn’t think of putting them in there with the Book. And the sheets — you’d never get the scent out.

Her books, her humble Koran, were all that was left to be packed; they went into the cardboard case; Ahmad, handyman of the family, home from the butcher’s yard, supplied a length of rope and strapped the case to take the strain off cheap locks. He remarked something to his brother and he and Ibrahim both exclaimed and laughed.

What does he say?

Ibrahim’s face crumpled wryly. Emigrant’s case. It must break… if it even gets to the other side. Piece of rubbish.

And now there was nothing left, of them, him and her, in the lean-to, except the bed they still slept in, made love in, for a few more days. He had insisted that they should be ready, no object, nothing to look back for, roll out the elegant case (it has wheels, of course), pick up the canvas bag and the cardboard acquisition and walk out to the taxi already ordered in advance for when the day and hour came; so he had them on the point of departure three days ahead of the day.

That night, after he had slipped from her body and rills left of her pleasure had ended, she spoke; but then sensed from the rhythm of his breathing that his silence did not mean he had heard what she feared and shamed herself with so that she could hardly goad herself to say what she had to say. He was asleep.

Just say the word

It was better perhaps to be less cowardly and not choose the dark, where you would not have to see the other’s face. More honest in the morning. They were dressing two days before their departure for America when she chose the moment, the close space of the lean-to round them when his brother had long left for the butchery, his other brother had gone to his post at the café, the women in the kitchen, except Khadija probably still in bed, the children, little Leila, off to school, and the mother — the mother perhaps at her prayer rug asking divine help to protect her son on his endless journey— that was the moment to say to him, not with I have something to tell you as a useless preparation, but directly, right out for what was between them; I am not going.

Where’s it you’re supposed to go?

For him, they’ve already left this place; but she might have one of the women she’d known here who expected still to see her.

I am not going — coming to America.

What is it you’re saying?

His voice was normal, as if sometimes when he needed a simplified phrase for something she had said in English.

I’m not going to America.

Of course you are going to America. On Thursday.

No. I’m not going.

Julie, what are you afraid of? What are these nerves. You are never like this.

He is ready to come to her, embrace her, soothe her, they must get away from here, this place has taken the spirit out of her.

Her hands are up, palms open, fingers splayed, holding him off. No. It’s not that. I’m not going.

What is she, who is she now, this woman who beckoned him to her, if ever a woman did, who followed him to this place — bewilderment, rage, what is it you feel that you never knew before, never would get yourself into this kind of provocation. Are you mad? His whisper is louder than a yell. You have gone out of your head. We are going on Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. That’s it.

Are you mad? Are you mad? Saliva filled his mouth, spit flew from his lips. Her silence was a wall of obduracy he could not pummel his fists against. He flung himself from the space that held them, stumbling against the iron bedstead, the chair, the obstacle of the charged canvas bag as he made for the door: it was too flimsy to bang behind him, he stood faced with the communal room of his mother’s house, aware at his back that she — the girl who picked him up, the lover, the faithful follower, the wife — could see him there through the gap of the sagging board. The family room was deserted; the sofa from which his mother surveyed all was unoccupied by her form. He did not know what he was looking for, for whom; if he had come out to look for — what? The one certainty in a life — it is not known until it suddenly is not there. And what does that mean? That his mother was not there for him on her throne; not now, this moment, not when he is in Africa, England, Germany, in Chicago, Detroit, not ever. That she, everything she has been, lover, follower at his heels, something called wife; she is not there. Not in the cottage, the café where she lured him for coffee, not on the iron bedstead in the lean-to, not in America. Not ever.

He did not want to see them, any of the family, no-one; and he needed at once someone. Anyone upon whom to lay ‘I’m not going’. To see from outside the self the effect of this statement. But it is never ‘anyone’ who is being sought; unacknowledged, in the deviousness, the reluctance to admit what is lodged deep, it is someone. He passed the warm voices coming from the kitchen; no, no, not the women; he found himself approaching the angle of privacy in the passage: but she was at prayer, his mother, her head bowed to her mat. He was the small boy who had burst upon her with the tale of a lost ball when she was in the middle of her devotions and had been shamed by reprimand; he slowed and turned away without her being aware of him.

And it happened to be Maryam he came upon. As he stood, back in the room the whole family lived in, every chair and cushion moulded to their weight, worn places on the carpet designed by the concourse of their feet, Maryam came smiling greeting to him on her way to the front door, leaving to clean her employer’s house. What she saw in his face and stance made her halt where she was; immediately she thought of some accident or illness in the family that somehow had been kept from her. So many dear ones, Ahmad working with knives at the butcher’s yard — she lived by tender concern for all. — What is wrong? What happened. Julie?—

— Nothing.—

— But you are— She feels her intrusion.

— Just woke up, that’s all.—

But he had now been assaulted from within by something he had not said, unable to think beyond Are you mad in response to a single meaning of I’m not going. Not going to Chicago, to Detroit, to California.