The Pickup

Chapter 22

Often he was away all day. He left early, for the capital. Things to do there; family matters, she was resigned to suppose: he was back home. The family was a graph of responsibilities to be traced, a tree not of ancestry but the complexity of present circumstances. There was the question of the sister-in-law living in the house, wife of the elder brother who was away over the frontier at the oil fields and whose earnings transferred to support his wife and children had for months failed to arrive from the agency in the capital. There was some problem over the father’s right to a portion of profit from a small rice crop owned by a collateral; no lawyer in the village to regulate these disputes? No. Responsibilities were expected of the return of a son experienced in the ways of a world outside. There was no suggestion that she should accompany him, these were not occasions to explore the city, what was the sense of her hanging about in queues before officialdom.

She rationed to herself the books provided in the elegant suitcase. Might be some time before she and he decided what they would do, their project (the vocabulary of her public relations period slipped in, like an accent discernible in a second-language speaker) — what a new life, here, was going to be.

A child gentle as a moth came in to the lean-to and stood watching her read.

The second time, the child sat down on the floor, so quiet that even her breath was no intrusion. Then the child brought with her the young woman who spoke a little English.

He had made the list.

Maryam — my little sister’s what do you call it, a domestic — she works in a house like my Uncle’s. And my sister Amina, who’s living here with her children, I don’t know what her husband is doing now — what work, if there is any. Ahmad, the tall brother, kills animals for a butcher, you can smell it when he comes in. That water you see being boiled— it’s what my mother always prepares for him to wash himself. The other one, that’s Daood, he is the coffee-maker in a café. My brother Zayd, Khadija’s husband — they say there’s no news, don’t know what’s happening with him. My small brother Muhammad is still at school, he sells cheese to the houses for a shopkeeper, walking everywhere. There, that is my family. Their professions.

It must have been the young sister’s day off — Friday, yes, Julie had seen her prostrate, praying beside her mother that morning. The book was put aside and they began to talk, bridging hesitancy with gestures — Julie, with mime — and laughter at each other’s attempts at being understood. Her Ibrahim had taught her nothing of the language, dismissing even the conventional polite exchanges. They’ll get it although you say good evening and thank you very much. But this young sister seemed to enjoy having the foreigner repeat these banalities become achievements, correcting the awkwardness of a throat producing unfamiliar sounds and lips shaped to expel them. In turn, the young woman slowly arranged the sequence of her English words, and waited attentively to hear of her mistakes. For the meal after midday prayers the child put her hand, a delicate frond of fingers, in Julie’s and led her along with Maryam to where in a room with no defined purpose the women of the house cooked food for everyone on two spirit burners — that feast on the return of the son from seeking his fortune must have come from the Uncle’s house. Julie wanted to help with washing dishes in the tin basins (the flowered ones she’d seen in the market); the ethics of the EL-AY Café did not allow oneself to be waited on except in a restaurant. But the women crowded about to prevent her from so much as putting her hands in water. The mother stood apart; it must have been her direction — from her son? — that this bride he had brought as that fortune from the other world could not be expected to take on what was the lot of women.

Maryam is such a bright girl.

Yes? He really does not know her; she was a child when first he went wherever it was he could pass immigration.

She says she wants to study. Doesn’t seem to know quite what — be a doctor, secretary in a company — glamourized careers she sees on television, for sure. But she is so hungry to learn. Why can’t she have the chance? Why should she be a nursemaid or whatever it is. She has a brain. You somehow got to the university.

Doesn’t she tell you she’ll be married next year. It has been arranged with the son of my father’s friend, the commissioner of police. The son is a policeman. You haven’t seen — they tell me he’s posted somewhere else. She will go there.

Julie echoes his customary conclusion: So that’s it.

She will be a wife. My mother — you can’t talk to her so how can you know. My mother is a very clever woman. She has a brain, as you say.

Oh I see that. It’s there in her face.

But you don’t know how she fought with everyone for education, that girl, forced her father to let her go to school to learn to write and read the Koran. In those days she was the only girl among the boys there. She could read newspapers and books no other girl could. She could say whole parts of the Koran — by heart, is it? Many verses. She still can. But it was arranged, she was married. And here she has been in this house giving us birth, feeding us, boiling water to clean us.

Julie could not understand the hostility in him at such times and could not know that he hardly understood it: whether it was against the bonds of a life he had set himself passionately adrift from, the sorrow that his mother’s life was, to him, and that he failed to change — and now; look at his mother — what would she have been, this image of dignity, all that she had endured and controlled, put down in the streets between the garage backyard and the company of the café table! Or was this animus against her—the tourist who like all tourists didn’t ever know what it was she really was looking at. The sense — the strength—his, in the possession of her, had been in the chance that she, her connections, what she was, would have obtained for him in her country what he could not attain. His animus the protection he must take to guard against that thing, luxury, people who could afford it called love — he found himself yielding to feel, for her. That would be his weakness — the day when she packed the elegant suitcase and went away, this adventure worn thin, as it will. Him the loser, yet again. He’s not for her. Papers refused.

He did not tell her that from the first day what he was doing when he left early on a morning for the capital was seeking out every contact, every strategy of wily ingenuity that could be got out of such contacts, to apply for visas for emigration to those endowed countries of the world he had not yet entered and been deported from. Australia, Canada, the USA, anywhere, out of the reproach of this dirty place that was his.

No point in raising hopes that might not succeed in time: before the adventure was over and the elegant suitcase packed for the EL-AY Café, and the beautiful terrace of her father’s house, although she didn’t care to call that home.