The Pickup Part 8

up and down, in a way that made her turn, smiling enquiry.

Have you got something else to put on. In one of the bags.

Put on? What?

He touched at his breast-bone in the open neck of his shirt. Here. To cover up.

But it's so hot. Don't I look all right? She hitched at the shoulders of the indeterminate sort of garment she wore as a comfortable travelling outfit with her jeans, the movement of muscle lifting for a moment into view the soft cupping of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

A scarf or something.

I don't see how I can get at things*in our stuff*among all these people, I'll be tramping over them. Wait. Wait*I've got a safety pin somewhere*

She drew together, at the base of her elegant long neck which would some day become flesh-ringed, the openings of the garment and pinned them, with some difficulty, on the inner side of the material so that the pin would not be obvious.

All right? All right?

With his eyes down, already preoccupied with some other thought, he signalled, a hand raised from the wrist, that whatever makeshift she had managed would have to serve.

She was not at home, now, in the EL-AY Cafe: she had been determined to come here, to this place. It had its rules, as her father's beautiful house and the guests who came there had theirs. She had made her choice; here it was. She was the one with the choices. The freedom of the world was hers.

There they were. In his mind. His mother for whom he had wanted to save the garage money, bring away from the yoke of family burdens in this dirty place, dirt of the politics of the rich, dirt of poverty. His father always with half-curled hanging hands of a man who lives only through the expectations he places on those he's engendered (they must live the life he could not), the brothers left behind, the sisters where there would be one, as usual, swollen with child, the husband knowing his place is not in the foreground, the sister-in-law, wife of the brother away at the oil fields, whose reputation of being difficult he's heard about; the children, babies when he left who must be gangling by now, the Uncle who no longer has a backyard workshop but a vehicle sales and repair business, the neighbours, witness to everything in each other's lives, coming to see what this son has brought from the world, his baggage and his strange wife.

Ibrahim ibn Musa. His face drew up in a grimace of pain and anger at the nature of their existence, but his eyes, black as theirs, swam tears across this vision of his people.

Julie Summers. In the human press of the airport, in the eyes of the man made out with difficulty in his cave of a shop, in the faces turned in curiosity to study her, close by in the bus, it came to her that she was somehow as strange to herself as she was to them: she was what they saw.

That girl, that woman had lived all her life in the eyes of black people, where she comes from, but never had had from them this kind of consciousness of self: so that was what home was. She was aware of this with an intrigued detach-ment. And it meant that when she went forward to his family in this state, with him, the son who belonged to them, she could do so offering herself in an emotional knowledge: if she was strangely new to them, she w-as also strangely new to herself.

There they were. At the bus terminus, men of the family:, they could not have known the exact time of arrival but they were there. The photographs that might have been*he wasn't sure*among the things he had kept at the garage and that she had never been shown*here they were brought to life. The formal group of men made them recognizable, distinguished from the anonymity of the distracting crowd; apart, they belonged to him, Abdu-Ibrahim, the wave of their joyousness broke over the couple. The elderly men among them, thick-creased faces, but no uncertainty about which was the father, there was a moment of stillness in that face*

the moment of unbelief at a longed-for materialization offering itself in the flesh*that made the man unmistakable despite no physical resemblance between father and son. The embraces were long. The rush and chatter of people in the terminus an accompanying chorus; she was caught up in the emotion of these men, did not know if she was part of them or of the chorus. It was as if she had lost sight of Ibrahim. He was presenting her to his father. The man made a speech of welcome, drawn back from the two of them, she felt his attention, he was addressing her, and she opened herself to it while the son, her husband, gave nervous pressures of some sort of impatience or disapproval on her arm as he translated. Speak English, speak English. *The interruption was not heeded.* He can speak a little. At least to greet you.

She jerked her arm against the restraining hand, in dismissal; the hoa.r.s.e flow and guttural hum of the language reached her on a wave-length of meaning other than verbal.

The second elderly man, arms stoutly crossed in confidence over his chest, smiling down upon the ceremonial from some vantage of his own, was introduced to her*the Uncle. The names of the others could not all at once match the individual brothers she knew of. and there were cousins to be confused with them, as well. Some wore casual Western clothes, others were in the traditional long white tunics that, for her, gave them undefined stature, the whole party made the path of their event out of the terminus and to four cars in which, arguing theatrically about who should go where, they found room for themselves. She sat at the pa.s.senger door, sharing the front seat with her husband who was close up beside the Uncle in his, the best car. The others accompanied them in a horn-blowing procession to their destination: the place, the street, the house where Ibrahim ibn Musa came from to the garage round the block from the EL-AY Cafe.

In a street, people were outside a house, smiling and stirring when the procession drew up blaring, the Uncle's car in the lead, the other, road-worn ones coming to a stop with shudders and jerks of their battered cha.s.sis. More neighbour-ing male relatives to be introduced, and among them the children of the house. The children stared at the woman Ibrahim brought, giggled, ran away when she laughed and held her arms wide to receive them. The house*its face, facade*she could be aware of only peripherally behind the excited a.s.sembly, the carrying of the elegant suitcase, canvas bag and bundles s.n.a.t.c.hed by various hands taking charge. A flat concrete roof with some clutter of living visible up there; women were peering down from behind its wall, eyes eager and smiling.

She pa.s.sed an empty pedestal flower-urn painted blue, a burglar grille ajar at the door.

Struck from the sunlight outside, centred in blinding dimness was the still darker shape of a solid figure seated on a sofa; the presence of this house.

She was produced before his mother by her husband. The welcome was formal; as her eyes grew accustomed to the change from the sun's intensity, the hushed room emerged, other women there. The presence*this woman with a beautiful face (she knew it was his mother he would look like) a.s.serted beneath a palimpsest of dark fatigue and grooves of unimaginable experience, addressed her majestically, at length and in their language, but her gaze was on her son and tears ran, ignored by her, down the calm of her cheeks. He translated abruptly, probably omitting elaboration, and then his mother engulfed him, the flight of sisters set upon him.

upon the woman he had brought as his wife. And at once her impression of his parents' house, his home, into which she had now truly been received was broken up by activities that spilled through doorways where people pushed past one another, balancing dishes of food wreathed in steam and sharp-sweet scents. The women were a swirl of their enveloping garments, polyester chiffon and braid, bobbing and dodging; the men were conducting, giving orders. People sat round small tables on the carpet and cushions and ate*the way Ibrahim had given up, in the company of The Table*agilely with their fingers. Not all the dishes could be found room for on the flowered cloths among gla.s.s plates and brightly-coloured gla.s.ses. There were bowls of fruit and sweetmeats on the television set; small children ate with concentration between the adults' feet and older ones raced in and out the front door helping themselves on the run. Ibrahim the bride-groom was at his father's side, Julie the bride was facing him across others, with his mother. She touched now and then at the pin that held her skimpy garment closed at her throat; the breathing of the powerful presence at her side stirred robes rising and falling, ample. The food was delicious; when she had had her fill of couscous and vegetable stew the women brought in mutton chops, salad, and handed round the honeyed sweetmeats; she at least knew enough to observe the eti-quette that here it was impolite to refuse anything offered; the strength of the coffee helped, long part of therapy after other kinds of indulgence, left behind. Sweet synthetic drinks took the place of wine; to signal her closeness she had lifted her gla.s.s to him, down there among the men, calling for his rare and beautiful smile*but it did not come, his glance met her a moment but he was apparently answering questions from his father and brothers. It was the Uncle who made him smile, booming laughter through a full mouth as he told what must have been a joke or made a salacious remark*this was, after all, a kind of wedding feast as well as a son's home-coming. One of the sisters shyly spoke English when urged by the women, in their own language, to come up to Ibrahim's bride. There was a phrase-book exchange so that the foreign newcomer to the family might not feel left out*the men were confidently animated among themselves, round the returned son, the women preoccupied with the replenishment of food, chattering softly as they moved swiftly about.

*How was the journey.*

*The journey was fine, but you know it is very far*

where Ibrahim and I came from.*

*We know. He sent us a letter. Some day it came. I hope you will like it here. It is a village only.*

*I hope you will show me your village.*

*Ibrahim will show.*

The two young women looked at one another in deep in-comprehensibility, each unable to imagine the life of the other: smiling. It was perhaps right then that she made the decision: I have to learn the language.

One of the doors led from the party directly into the room that obviously had been vacated for Ibrahim and his chosen wife. The elegant suitcase and the canvas bag stood as they had, way back in her cottage. He closed the door on the company clearing up the feast in the communal room.

There was the huge old, high bed with its carved head-and footboards. An array of coloured covers under a cro-cheted white spread. She was admiring: how splendid.

Ibrahim, what a bed.

He saw it; it is his mother's and father's bed, the only splendour of their marriage, the absurd pretension of the start of driven poverty, the retreat into which each has col-lapsed exhausted every night for all their years. It is the bed in which each will die.

It's the bed in which he was conceived.

Julie began to unpack gifts they had brought.

No. Not now. Tomorrow we'll give them. It's enough for today.

He tugged back the lace curtains at the window. Tomorrow. He would insist that his parents move back into this room, he and she must find somewhere else to sleep.

A little later she went over to him. What I need now is a long, hot bath. Where's the bathroom?

There was no bathroom. Had she thought of that, when she decided to come with him. This place is buried in desert.

Water's like gold is in her country, it's got to be brought up from deep, far down, pumped to this village*what there is of it. Had she any idea of what a burden she would be. So there it is. Madness. Madness to think she could stick it out, here.

He was angry*with this house, this village, these his people*to have to tell her other unacceptable things, tell her once and for all what her ignorant obstinacy of coming with him to this place means, when she failed, with all her privilege, at getting him accepted in hers. Tomorrow. The other days ahead.

And it was as he knew it was going to be.

She wants to see 'everything'. They haven't been in his parents' house more than two days when she says, if he doesn't feel like coming along, if there are people he needs to consult, things he needs to do, she's quite happy to explore the village, hop on a bus and see the capital, on her own.

Of course. Of course. Independent. This is the way she's accustomed to living, pleasing herself. Again. But that's impossible, here. He has to be with her, some member of the family, if there could be one who could be understood, has to accompany her everywhere beyond a few neighbourhood streets, that's how it is in the place he thought he had left behind him. It's not usual for women to sit down to eat with the men, today was a special exception for the occasion*does she understand. It's enough, for these people, that she goes about with an uncovered head*that they can tolerate with a white face, maybe. He has sharply resisted his mother's taking him aside to insist that his wife put a scarf over her head when leaving the house or in the company of men who were not family; resisted with pain, because this is his mother, whom he wanted to bring away to a better life. And she, the one he has brought back with him, all that he has brought back with him, is the cause of this pain.

It's not an alarm clock you fumble a hand out to stifle. The rising wail lingers and fades, comes again as if a dream has been given a voice, or*there's the grey, lifted eyelid prelude of dawn in the room*some animal out in the desert sounds its cry. There are jackals, they say.

It's the call to prayer.

The first adjustment to any change must be to the time-frame imposed within it; this begins with the small child's first day at school: the containment of life in a society com-mences. The other demarcations of the day set by that particular society follow, commuter time, clock-in time, canteen break time, workout time or c.o.c.ktail time, and so on to the last divide of the living of a day, depending on your circ.u.mstances. Five times each day the voice of the muezzin set the time-frame she had entered, as once, in her tourist travels, she would set her watch to and live a local hour different from the one in the country left behind.

After much discussion in the language she couldn't understand but whose mixed tenors of hurt feeling and obduracy she felt intensely*somehow herself the cause of it*in the presence of the father's and son's contestation and the monu-mental silence of his mother ignoring her, they had taken the elegant suitcase and canvas bag and moved to the lean-to room and an iron-frame bed. There were shifting sounds beyond the house wall and the clang of the front door grille.

The father accompanied by only one of the brothers went to dawn prayers at the mosque. Abdu-Ibrahim beside her turned and folded the pillow over his ear against the muezzin's summons. At noon, afternoon and evening he seemed not to hear it, either, without having to block his ears.

She asked what were the other functions of the muezzin?

There isn't any muezzin, there's a recording and a loud-speaker, you see it on top of the mosque, that is what we have in the miracle of technology in our place.

But he went, without comment, to Friday prayers with his father and a day after arrival had begun to wear the skull-cap tossed aside with his clothes she could see from their bed when the muezzin opened the day for her. The cap was intricately embroidered with silver thread, she guessed by his mother; he warned her to keep respectfully clear and quiet when his mother spread her small velvet rug and swayed her forehead to it over her obeisant bulk in a private trance of prayer in the sheltered angle of a pa.s.sage where members of the household came and went.

So she wanted to see the place. What is there to see in a place like ours.

Not Cape Town where they were going to start a business by the sea and famous mountain.

Tourists don't come here, what for. The tomb of Sidi Yusuf, the holy man from long ago, supposed to be why this place grew. Not much of a shrine, only people from round about in the desert come to it.

She put her arms round his back and rested her lips against the glossy black hair above his nape. I'm not a tourist.

He took her with his sister, Maryam, to a large vacant lot with a trampled fence and a gate hanging without function.

Market day. Rickety stalls distorted by heat were stacked and spread, spilling to the stony sand geometric arrangements of vegetables, fruit, dried teguments and strips of something unidentifiable*fish or meat*grain, flat bread, concoctions of things*creatures?*imprisoned in jars, towers of volup-tuous watermelons swagged with green and gold stripes, and garlands of strung bicycle wheels, vehicle hubcaps and battered tools, old radios, gutted refrigerators a.s.sembled*an objets trouves art work, she told him delightedly. She asked Maiyam about a man squatting at work on an ancient portable typewriter while a woman spoke volubly at him. *

Many don't know how to write. They pay for a letter.* Another sat with bright powders of different colours in little dishes spread on a rug*spices rather than potions, she supposed. Cobblers: the piles of old shoes whose mis-shape taken on from living feet suggest the dead. A man with the appearance the blind have of talking aloud to themselves was inton-ing what must be religious texts. Ibrahim had to hang about while she gazed along the stock of a stall selling posters, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the Dome of The Rock, the splendidly intricate calligraphy of inscribed verses from the Koran.

I want to know.

He gave a little snort of a laugh, and a gentle push for her to move on. Third-hand clothes were piled for a fourth-hand wearing, sungla.s.ses and cellphones were offered by touts; there were stacked plastic plates, cups, bowls, and enamelled jugs, cooking pots, kettles decorated with flower patterns of organic ostentation that seemed tactless in a desert village.

Why does the world dump these hideous things here, don't the people make much better things for themselves?

These don't break so soon.

But she takes responsibility upon herself. Why do we send only such s.h.i.t.

The sister with her few words of English was trying to follow, her eyes on him, his words.

Because here there's no money to pay for anything else.

Here is where she has insisted on coming, here she is, with the gaudy tin basins that offend her, the children wearing oddments of the fourth-hand cast-offs, fancy running shoes clumped at the end of bone-thin legs*and who knows how they got hold of those*pestering to sell two or three cigarettes or a handful of sweets.

Later in the day the Uncle came to fetch his nephew and bride for a visit to his house*he no longer lived next door, in the street where Ibrahim was born; other relatives, distant cousins, were the occupants now. The car was hung with amulets, illuminated Arabic texts, and pungent with some washroom scented spray, his laughing guttural voice could have been disc-jockey chatter accompanying the winding incantations of Easternized American pop on the car radio.

Ibrahim lowered a window and as they pa.s.sed she was able to identify the market-place again, emptied, taken over by stray goats, crows, and a scatter of boys playing football. She was oddly conscious of him, Ibrahim, her husband, yes*watching her as if to perceive before she did what she might be seeing. This street was the only tarred one in the village, men were sitting under the drooping slant of rough awnings drinking coffee, some apparently playing a game*difficult to make out what it was, from a moving vehicle. Everywhere, selling and buying. Black-draped women trailed capering children who could have been anywhere*the exuberance of childhood is a universal response to being alive; his, in this village, might not after all have felt so different from hers, climbing over Gulliver in a beautiful garden, falling asleep with plush toys bought by Nigel Ackroyd Summers in duty-free airport shops of the world. It is only with growing up.

becoming the man he is and the woman she is, that circ.u.mstances come between you. Outside the haphazard stretch of sheds and buildings either half-completed or half-fallen-down, difficult to say which, she sees for the first time in her life two old men actually sharing a water-pipe, the hookah of ill.u.s.trations to childhood's Scheherazade stories. So much life!

But he closes the smeary window as the Uncle bounces the car off tarmac onto the sand track that must lead to his new address.

The Uncle's house has everything to the limit of the material ambitions that are possible to fulfil in this place*if his nephew, entering, needs to be reminded of this, which is always with him, implacable warning that prods and pierces him, flays him to rouse the will to carry on washing dishes in a London restaurant, swabbing the floors of drunken vomit in a Berlin beer hall, lying under trucks and cars round the block from the EL-AY Cafe and emerging to take the opportunity*what choices are there*to become the lover of one of those who have everything (the Uncle could never dream of) and who could be a way to fulfil a need*a destiny!*to realize one's self in ambitions hopeless in this place.

The aunt, bound about with gold jewellery on wrists and ox-blood-fingernailed hands, withdrew Julie to the women's quarters of the house, where the daughters remained during the visit. She and the aunt returned to the men*Ibrahim explained afterwards it was not allowed for a male to see his female cousins, although, what seemed in contradiction of orthodox modesty, while one of the young women was dressed in flowing tradition like the mother, the other daughter wore jeans and the latest in high platform-soled boots.

Julie notices that he is*can it be!*somehow touched by dread, foreboding, in the rooms that the Uncle is proudly showing them round. She cannot ask*among all her questions later*what it was that came to him in that harmlessly vulgar house as they were seated on carved and gilded chairs and plied with sherbet, dates and sweetmeats. The backyard repairs have become a large workshop hidden behind the elaborate tiled wall of the courtyard with its hibiscus and canopied swing-couches. There, the Uncle explains and asks Ibrahim to translate for her. he has district government contracts to maintain and repair all official vehicles and ministers' cars, he is the official agent for American and German cars, American, German and Italian spare parts and, of course, his is the only service anyone who has a good-model vehicle comes to from villages even several hours' journey across the desert.

That is what he has made of himself.

*Remember you used to come to help out when you were a kid, the wrecks we fixed up? In the old yard?*tell her!*

*She knows. She knows I learned from you how to pre-tend to be a mechanic.*

This in their language; she could only laugh when they did, not aware it was at the vision of him, that first time, the grease-monkey under a car.

Returned to their lean-to he lay on his back on the bed in his unconscious grace as he had at her cottage, eyes deep as wells she would feel herself as if straining precariously to look into. That Uncle's made a go of it, hasn't he.

Yes.

She often has the sense that he is not looking at her when his regard is on her: it is she who is looking for herself reflected in those eyes.

Yes. The success you can have in this place.

But are they talking from the same premise? Is she wryly admiring the success, on a humble scale, of a Nigel Ackroyd Summers she has removed herself from, far as she could, by way of the EL-AY Cafe and a man without papers or a name.- is he drily remarking there is no comparison with the success available to those with access to financial inst.i.tutions quoted on the stock exchange?

Neither knows.

They make love, that unspoken knowledge they can share; that country to which they can resort.

Where the street ended, there was the desert.

Led by the children down the row of houses like the family one, lean-tos and haggard walls, bright motifs of paint, dusty plants, leaning bicycles, cars sputtering from broken exhausts, men lounging, women at windows, washing hooked on a fence, more children who race and skitter, garrulous radio discourse, the man selling bean rissoles calling out*this everyday life suddenly ends.

It was bewildering to her: come to a stop. At the end of a street there must be another street. A district leads to another district. And a road, a highway that links one place of habitation to others. There was the mound of detritus unravelled, tin cans rolled away, spikes of gla.s.s signalling back to the sun; and then, in the terms by which humans judge the significance of their presence*nothing. Sand. No shapes. No movement. When she came back to the house: It's not the wind months, he told her. You don't want to be here for that, believe me.

She laughed. We are here.

They are right, those people in the village he is aware see 139 Nadine Gordimer her as something they never have, a tourist. Tourists don't endure the bad seasons, that's not for them.

Julie is accustomed to being active. He and she can't sit about in the house all day, waiting for*what to do next. She wants some little expedition into the desert but is aware of his distaste*the heat is too bad and you need a four-wheel-drive. The Uncle has generously lent them*Ibrahim insists*

no it's my gift to your marriage the Uncle p.r.o.nounces carefully in English*a car in fair condition and they drive around the village, the school from which some teacher managed to get him sent on to education beyond memorizing the Koran, what used to be the sports field, donkeys there now; a lop-sided sign whose script she had him translate for her indicates a boarded-up communal hall, stalls propped one against the other*a fall of shavings from a carpentry shop, men, always men, drinking coffee*the groan of a generator and thick steam coming from the pipes of a dilapidated hospital, the mosque where she can only picture him on Fridays, she is a woman, and even she who may go anywhere in the world, do as she likes, cannot enter. What else is there: this is his place.

She wanted to buy sandals like the ones his sister-in-law Khadija wore so they went to look for the shoemaker who might have them. How get lost in a village he must have known, roam-ing every turn and twist, as a boy! Landing at empty lots, abandoned workshops, they didn't find the shoemaker but in this part of the village she saw as a ruin but was the normal state of la.s.situde in the extremes of poverty, there was no demarcation between what was the thoroughfare and the shacks where goats were tethered and women squatted in their black garb like crows brought down wounded*suddenly he had to swerve to avoid a dead sheep lying bloated in a shroud of flies. Now she was appalled.

Ah poor thing! Why doesn't someone bury it!

His foot on the accelerator made the violent pressure of an about-turn, churning up stones and sand.

He lies like a corpse and a fly lands on his forehead.

Dead sheep. Rotting.

He is ashamed and at the same time angrily resentful that she is seeing it (over again, he sees her), it will be an image of his country, his people, what he comes from, what he really is*like the name he has come back to be rightfully known by. Not for her; no, that was it.