Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

He left Maryam looking aside from him in her tact, and burst back to the lean-to, dragging the door shut behind him.

She was standing at the window. She turned with the agony of composure drawn in tight lines between her brows and around her mouth.

So you’re going back. There. Where you come from. I thought it all the time. One day. The day will be that you go home where you always say is not your home. But you see I was right. You do not know what you say. That is how it is with you. So you don’t know what you do. To people. Good luck. Goodbye. Tell them all at the Café, this shack you live in, this dirty place, and tell them you’re too good, you’re very fine, you won’t what is it — sell out, they say— you don’t live with the capitalists in California, tell them, you’ll think of everything to tell. Goodbye. Go and tell. Goodbye.

He began transformed by anger, his face dyed with rising blood, his eyes narrowed to chips of black glitter, his body strangely gathered as if to spring, and ended — as if by a knife thrust within himself — in dejection.

She was afraid of the dejection, not the anger which she had, his violent breath — taken in with open mouth. She came to him, stumbling as he had done over their baggage and he tried to fend off her hands and arms as she clung to him. Don’t say. Don’t say.

No right, hers, to say now what was eloquently unsaid ever since — certainly the first nights in the doll’s house— I love you.

Listen to me. Where did you get the idea. I’m not going back there. I don’t belong there.

She has taken his head between her hard palms and forced his face before her, she feels his texture, the nap of a day’s growth of beard against her skin. She has the image of him, one of those habitual and dear, pressing his tongue against the inner side of his cheek to tauten the flesh as he delicately shaves round his moustache; the image stored.

You know that. Saying both at once: the unsaid (that stored image is love) and what has been said, I’m not going back.

What are you talking? What is it. You are not going to America. That’s what you say. You are not going to your home. That is what you say.

And now she has to tell him what she thought he must have understood. I’m staying here.

The passion of dispute that erupts like this abandons intimacy that has been respected; through the makeshift door of the lean-to it flowed to the family living-room, through the whole house, invading, overtaking the preoccupations and concerns of all who lived so closely there; as if each, even the children, looked up from these, through the day, as at a sudden sound or sight. What happens between man and wife, that’s their business, it is customary to maintain the principle of privacy even to the extent of appearing to be unaware that anything is happening. In a house crowded with relatives this is particularly stringent; not only the door of the lean-to is too thin. The surface conventions of blood ties and religious observance are able to contain subsumed almost without a ripple, for example, the presence of Khadija and its implications. But whatever is happening in the lean-to is different, it thrusts itself in demand upon the house. As son, brother, cousin he has no option, no other resource but to come out and repeat to each relative the same account of what has happened in that lean-to — from where she, the foreign wife he brought to them, does not appear, either because she accepts that he speak for her, or because he does not allow her to speak for herself. Who can say. But even when her favourite, the small Leila, is seen by him making for the lean-to door, he sends the child away.

Everyone is confronted with this account, even those who are only embarrassed and bewildered by a situation they cannot understand, they shouldn’t be admitted to. Something that belongs to the life of this family member so different from theirs, lived unimaginably in worlds they do not know. As if he could expect some explanation, support, from them in their innocence, the ignorance he has always made them aware they live in. His brothers Ahmad and Daood listen to him in disbelief, a woman does what her husband says. They are too loyal to him, too respectful, to reveal what this makes him immediately alert to again: the stigma on his manhood. The women — she’d now joined them, the kitchen was the neutral ground from which to take the right of entry by way of household tasks, playing with their children, exchanging pidgin-language — when he approached the women their embarrassment emanated from them like sweat. It was from their gathering under the awning they spoke at all. She is a very good person. It will be all right. She will do what is right, she is a wife. Sometimes we just get upset, you know, for a while, then it passes, ma sha allah.

His insistence drove them into silence. — There is no time for a mood to pass. Two days. That’s it. I want to know, has she talked to you. This business. Staying here. In this place. Have you said anything like that to her? Have you? I need an answer. Has she been talking like this?—

Amina looked round over the bundle of her baby at the others and shook her head conclusively, earrings swinging, in mandate of denial.

He had the thought of getting one of the women to speak to her; but he now felt no one of them really was to be trusted. Never mind teaching a few words of English, she had influenced them with her rich girl’s Café ideas of female independence.

In his father’s face, the slow lowering and raising of thick eyelids and the twitching parentheses at either corner of the mouth, he saw that the response was silent reproach, brought up, deserved, for being too proud and foolish to have taken the chance offered him, Al-Hamdu lillah, by his Uncle Yaqub to stay where he, a son, belongs.

Again the laconic response: a wife follows what her husband wishes.

This from a father who the son knew did what his wife in her wisdom and character, yes, Al-Hamdu lillah, knew was right.

Facing himself this way and that, where to turn— Maryam. Maryam, alone. With the other women, she had said nothing. Maryam: of course, who was the first to see blazoned on his face as she left the house for her work as a servant, I’m not going. Maryam made herself the friend, acolyte, it is his little sister Maryam who had the idea of the occupations, the English teaching, Maryam who made his wife at home in this place, well, all right, gave her something to do in the meantime, waiting with a poor devil all those months applying for visas. Whom else to turn to. Like a blood-letting, confront her.

Summoned on her return from work for charges against her, and she knows it at once, it slows her feet as she comes into the house from the place beneath the awning where the child Leila has been sent to fetch her. Alone; he’ll see her alone, without the twittering support of the women.

— What does she say to you. I want to know. What do you tell her, you are the one, you tell her what to do here, you make her your sister here, afraid to be without you, the ladies that offer tea and learn English, the schoolteachers who flatter her. I want to know. What have you done. Who told you to do this. Did you ask me, your brother? Come, I want to hear from you what you have been saying to her.—

He has a power over this girl he will never have over his wife Julie, and that he would never want to have, it is part of what he emigrates from, every time he gets away. While he exerts it, it sickens him, the anger his sister fearfully sees rising in him. — Come. Speak, speak. What have you done. — She has been weeping through his tirade.

He cannot make out what she’s saying now. — What? Speak!—