The Pickup

Chapter 21

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 glass 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 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 pronounces 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, roaming 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 lassitude 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.