The Pickup

Chapter 23

He is back helping out in his Uncle’s vehicle repair workshop.

Ibrahim ibn Musa.

The processes of applying for permission to enter someone else’s country from this one are numerous and set no definite period for their conclusion. The verdict — yes or no, and under what conditions — takes even longer. The local consular representative of the country concerned, after the applicant has managed to get past counter clerks and sit before him, has to send all relevant documents back and forth to the Ministry in that country; they slip to the bottom of a pile, get lost in the interstices of a filing cabinet, are wiped out by computer failure, and the process has to start over again. There is no use asking for reasons; and then there are new questions from the Ministry, requiring still further documentation, to and fro. And underlying all this that is taking place openly on stamped forms and computer screens there are other measures, anything and everything that can be tried to wriggle under power-lines of bureaucracy, and that have succeeded, it is legendary, the odyssey of emigration, for some, while failing — he follows their experience every day, with compatriots at a coffee stall — for others.

She has been only the Siren to his Ulysses. Whereas in her country it had been up to her to importune the influential and engage lawyers etc. in the contest with the bureaucracy of authority — an unsuccessful diversion, even if attractive— in this place, this situation back here, he is the one who must have the know-how, or somehow acquire it. What had served him before, when he managed to get some kind of dubious entry to a country, might not — did not — work now; the equivalent national humanitarian symbols of the Lady With The Upheld Torch, like her, no longer welcome but use the Light to frisk each applicant blindingly for possible connections with international terrorism — people fighting their own foreign ideological battles on other nations’ soil, or carrying in their body fluids the world’s latest fatal disease. This country which claimed him by his birth, his features and colour, his language, and the Faith that he had to fill in on forms although he did not know if his mother’s son was still a Believer — this country was well known to have a high rating as a place of origin from which immigrants were undesirable.

She, his foreign wife, was the right kind of foreigner. One who belonged to an internationally acceptable category of origin. When he was simply handed a single form for her application for a visa for any of the countries he favoured, he had now to tell her what his absences in the capital were about.

I started right away to get us out of here.

But where to. She was reading down the form as she spoke. What sort of country.

Does she still believe in choice. But he gave her his slow rare smile that he knew she was, always, moved to coax from him. Any one we can have.

All right for her. For him, her husband, if other ways were to be followed where official ones were going to be a no-no, these cost money. She had no scruples about this so long as bribes could be managed, here, without danger to him; the only reason why this course hadn’t been resorted to back in her country was the warning of the lawyer that he would find himself in more trouble. There were the tourist dollars she had brought with her; her only hesitation was how would he and she continue to contribute food and other necessities — things his mother certainly needed — if the money ran out? The Uncle wasn’t paying him, at present — apparently the old car and free fuel were regarded as compensation for having him back under vehicles. This time the fleet of the provincial administration and now as a mechanic genuine-trained in a big city far from us! — This was the Uncle’s bonhomie that, once she had Ibrahim translate for her, she began to recognize in its frequent repetition.

We’ll be gone before then.

He was fixed in determination as on something palpable, as he stripped himself of jeans and T-shirt. The designer jeans were oil- and dirt-stained now, there were no trade unions with rules for the protection of workers, the kind of business the Uncle owned so profitably did not supply overalls. His determination was an awesome possession she had never seen, never needed to be called forth either in the life of her father’s suburb or the sheltered alternatives of her friends. Never known in herself — well, perhaps when she stood in the cottage before him with two flight tickets instead of one.

She picked up the jeans and shirt, and the simple gesture, could have been that of his mother or sisters, sent him over to her. His naked feet covered hers, his naked legs clasped her, and he smothered her head against his breast as if to stay something beginning in her.