Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

Unnoticed in the house’s customary bustle of hospitality and the rising voices of the company, she took her tea and went to the lean-to. She drank it slowly, placed the cup and saucer on the window-sill and was standing at the window when there was a tap at the door. Before she could answer it was opened; Khadija there. Khadija has never come to the lean-to. Khadija dragged the ill-fitting door closed behind her with her often-heard scornful sigh, dangling a bunch of dates, her strong red-painted lips twisted as she savoured what was in her mouth.

Khadija put an arm round her conspiratorially, smiled intimately and held out the bunch of sweetness, smooth dark shiny dates. She spoke Arabic, the foreigner understands enough, now.

— He’ll come back.—

But perhaps a reassurance offered for herself, Khadija thinking of her man at the oil fields.

Too long a sacrifice W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Churchtown: The Cuala Press, 1920).

Whoever embraces a woman Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Happiness’, Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems (New York: Viking).

I decided to postpone our future Feodor Dostoievsky, ‘The Meek One’, The Diary of a Writer — Feodor Dostoievsky, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: George Braziller, 1954).

Rose thou art sick William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’:

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

‘Songs of Experience’, Songs of Innocence and Experience with Other Poems (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1866).

Let us go to another country William Plomer, ‘Another Country’, Visiting the Caves (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). In his Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), Plomer published a slightly different version of this poem.

And remember Job ‘The Prophets’, Sura XXI, The Koran, trans. Rev. J. M. Rodwell, with an introduction by Rev. G. Margoliouth (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1948), p. 156.

And make mention in the Book of Mary ‘Mary’, Sura XIX, The Koran, p. 118.

The God of Mercy hath taught ‘The Merciful’, Sura LV, The Koran, p. 74.

And she conceived ‘Mary’, Sura XIX, The Koran, p. 118.

al Kitab wa-l-Qur’an: Qira’a mu’asira The views expressed by the young men are based on quotations from this book by Shahrur Muhammad Shahrur, as cited by Nilüfer Göle in her article ‘Snapshots of Islamic Modernities’, Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) (Winter 2000).

I was occupied in picturing him Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. John Linton (London: The Hogarth Press).

Grateful thanks to my generous mentor, Philip J. Stewart of the University of Oxford.

Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burgers Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me and, most recently, The House Gun. Her collections of short stories include Something Out There and Jump. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in South Africa.