The Pickup

Chapter 26

In the meantime.

Waiting generates a pace of its own; routine, that is supposed to belong to permanence, forms out of the fact that in the meantime there is nothing else to be done. Ibrahim takes the old car the Uncle has lent — given — them and goes to the Uncle’s vehicle workshop in the morning, Julie has classes in English at Maryam’s employer’s house and at a school— word-of-mouth makes more claims on an apparent skill or gift she didn’t know she had. In the family house Maryam has gathered her sister Amina, who has just given birth, and Khadija, wife of the son missing at the oil fields; they and others come unobtrusively to join the exchange, picking up Julie’s language, Julie picking up theirs, under a torn awning at the back of the house that stretches to an oleander whose pink flowers are thick with dust, like a woman who uses too much powder. There is no palm tree. The shade is thin and the shifting of light across the faces, Julie’s and theirs, is a play upon what each does not know, in unfamiliarity, and is beginning to have revealed, in glances of intuition about the other. Maryam has become almost fluent, or Julie has become quicker at understanding what the girl is getting at in the locutions and inevitable substitutions of one English word for another. Maryam insists that Khadija is the one who can impart their language to Julie far better than she can, Khadija comes from the capital, she finished school ‘all the way’. It is not just the young girl’s inarticulacy in the foreign language that is the reason for this advocacy; everyone in the family knows, even Ibrahim’s wife has seen, that Khadija is in a state of frustration which swings from being found weeping in a corner (the one reserved for the mother’s prayer mat, at that) to angry imprecations against her husband, a son of the house. Ibrahim calls her, privately to his wife, that crazy woman. She shouts at my brother for being dead, perhaps he is dead, God knows. Maryam’s delicate way of wanting to help her sister-in-law is to attempt to distract her by recognizing her superiority and flattering her into the obligation to use it to help someone else: their new sister-in-law, Ibrahim’s wife. — I tell Khadija, she is lonely without our language.—

Julie repeated this to him.

Isn’t that original? Maryam’s such an unusual girl, it even comes out in her broken English. She’s right about Khadija, though. Khadija never looks at me, you know she’s somehow haughty, but she’s listening and then she corrects me, I’m really learning pronunciation from her. Talk to me. You’ll see. We must use your language together …

He was back from the Uncle’s workshop and had fetched the water his mother heated for him. The tin tub was kept ready in the lean-to; he would not allow Julie to fetch water: the other women in the house smiled to see him carry the bucket, women’s work; his mother kept her face set against the spectacle, turned away from him. He might indeed be away; one of his exiles where he could not be placed in her mind, only in a biological awareness of him that circulated in her blood, pumped through the heart.

What are the names — I don’t know, the, the … you know … the love words… I’d like to hear them. You’ve never said them to me …?

We must talk English. I need to speak English. I must speak English with you if I am going to get a decent job anywhere. I can be able to study some more there. Only with English. He tipped the water to the tub.

Scrubbing at himself as he crouches he feels the greasestains of engine innards, the dirt-coating of tools blackened under his nails, as if all over his body, the condition of his life she has never known, how could this one, who had taken a fancy to him in this state he must escape from, ever know. And he is aware that he is in dialogue with himself in the language she now has taken a fancy to learn, no use to her, to them, where they would go. But what use — cruelty — to tell her that in the life she’s decided for herself, following him, nice accomplishments are a luxury. Ramadan was approaching. Who would have thought I’d still have her in this place, we’d still be here then. The fine suitcase not gone from where she’s pushed it away under the bed, her adventure not over, we make love on that poor iron bed and I please her, my God how I please her. And no visas for me.

He told her it was of course not necessary that she should fast. With his father and the rest of the family, he would: because of his mother.

With the family and the whole village, wasn’t that so?

Why should she be the exception? The only one. Lonely without the language. He ought to be able to understand; here, here in his home, she was what he had been at The Table in the EL-AY Café with her friends, at the terrace lunch party to bid farewell to the couple and their driver welcomed by Australia. Of course I’ll fast.

You’ll make yourself ill. To be without water is terrible. Don’t think only, no food; food is nothing, nothing, not like water. Believe me.

Rubbish, my love! I can do with losing some padding, I eat too much at these family meals, I’m getting a fat backside, look.

Another adventure.

He believes she may never learn; or perhaps never have to learn the rules of survival, always has all choices open to her.

Against the rusty complaints of the iron bedstead under love-making only half-unclothed she murmured, taking up an unconcluded subject, I’m all the way with you. A banal phrase from The Table, but all she had.

The pace of waiting transformed completely. Reaction to the span of the Ramadan day was exactly like the reaction of body and mind to the time-change on arrival in a country whose hours are far behind or ahead of the one departed from. The same vague swaying sensation of seeing surroundings through a distorting lens, not really unpleasant, a lazy resistance against drooping eyelid muscles, the consciousness saying, let me sleep, shut out the light, do not answer the vacuum sucking at the stomach: satisfy me, it’s the hour. And the strange surprise: the nights now were cold; the picture-postcard place was one of perpetual heat; there had been no Northern Hemisphere season of winter in that desert. She missed the pre-dawn meal for which there was really no designation, it is the meal, ultimate sustenance; she could not goad herself sufficiently awake to ingest. Thought and reaction slowed while the house was a murmuring hive of women at prayer and the men were at the mosque. However they occupied the other periods of the day, the men of the family kept to themselves elsewhere in male company. Julie did not expect to see Ibrahim until they returned after sunset. Sometimes the women visited one another, gathered at this neighbouring house or that. The mother saw her son’s wife leave in the company of Maryam, Amina, Khadija and the children for a cousin’s house; tranquilly watching from her sofa. After a while, she went to her place of prayer. An hour or more passed before she returned to the sofa in the deserted family room, and recognizing, as always, the gait and weight of his footsteps, heard her son unexpectedly return. She rose, going to him as he quietly entered. They met for a moment silently; in their faces each the likeness of the other. Then the tone of her voice, meant only for him, held the cadence of the prayers that had filled her afternoon, as a passage of music continues to sound in the ears: —Are you not well, my son.—

He inclined his head towards his mother in the special gesture — submission? love? — reserved for her. With his father he had always a ready exchange, often a combat of controlled disagreement between them. With the mother there often seemed hardly need for words. A pause. — I don’t know … no, just tired. — He looked towards the lean-to door and away again.

Between them was knowledge of the taboo, to be observed absolutely, that a husband and wife must not retire together to their bedroom during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when any intimacy between men and women is forbidden.

— Your wife is with Maryam and the others at Zuhra’s.—

The gesture of the inclined head towards his mother, again.

Working with cars and heavy trucks and all the time back, back to those foreign offices in the capital planning to go away. When would he ever take care of himself.

— You need rest.—

No need for either to remark that when the women came back he would hear and leave the lean-to before his wife might enter. Mother and son sat a few minutes together before she returned to her place of prayer.

He went to the lean-to — and there she was, Julie. He stayed himself in the doorway, then pulled the ill-fitting door carefully closed behind him.

You left the other men?

He could have said, You left the other women. He gave his wife his smile, that of himself which was for this one: for her. I’m tired.

So was I. They’re sweet, but the chatter — it gets to be like being caught in an aviary.

He kicked off his shoes and, a moment’s hesitation, doffed the embroidered cap held with a clip on the thick hair of his crown, he lay down on the bed, an obedient child sent to nap. You need rest. She lay beside him, their bodies not touching. Perhaps she knew of the taboo, Maryam might have told her; maybe not. It seemed a long time; neither slept nor spoke.

She felt desire rising in her and unfolding, thickening those other lips of hers, overwhelming the lassitude of hunger and the drought of thirst. And she was ashamed; she knew that sexual acts, like other forms of indulgence, were forbidden during these dedicated days, though this abstinence proved to add deferred excitement to love-making in the nights. Her hand went out to assure herself that it would only seek his in the aspect of love that is companionship, but it encountered bewilderingly his penis raised under his clothes. She withdrew the hand swiftly. She didn’t know where to place it in relation to herself after the contact. Again some kind of measure of time passed at this pace that was unlike any other. They turned to one another in the same moment, and he divested her of her disguise of clothes and she divested him of his. But she was the one who put the palm of a hand on his breast to stay him, thinking of the complaining springs of the iron bedstead, and lay down on the floor to receive him.

There was water in the jar they kept beside the tin tub. They washed each other off themselves; maybe her infidel’s guilty illusion of cleansing absolution. But he silently dressed, pinned the embroidered cap on his crown, and left. His mother was not in her place on the sofa. She must have been still at prayer, but she would have known, even from the disturbance in the air of the house — made by his body, alone of anyone else’s, the passage of her son’s presence — that he had recovered his forces and gone to rejoin the men.

Women and children came back, high tide of the house’s life over-running its secret streams. Maryam was asking— Has Julie gone out again?—

— She was with you.—

— Oh she didn’t stay long, she left to go home.—

Maryam called softly at the lean-to door with her usual one-knuckle tap.

— Yes? I’m coming.—

The sound of the foreign voice choked the mother with a strangle of shock.

There, there in the bedroom. Before her son came away from the men, before she told him his wife was with the other women, she herself, the mother, was alone in the house, for him — the woman had come back, unheard in the concentration of prayer, the alcove of devotion, and she was in that bedroom all the time.

There. Fear and anger hastened breathing to gasps. Amina and Maryam were alarmed by the heaving of the mother’s great breast; what was it, a heart attack? Her outspread hand erased them rather than waved them away; the day-long deprivation of water, the sun was setting, she would drink deeply, that is all that is needed.

At the meal to break the day’s fast her son was animated as any of the family in the pleasure of satisfying a hunger and thirst unique to the time-frame of Ramadan, the reward of abstention from all indulgence.

The mother did drink deeply. Not only of water, but of the shame and sin of what he had done: her son; she could not look at this beloved face, as if she would see it horribly changed, only for her — others were still seeing him handsome and full of grace — into corruption and ugliness. And that face, since she had bequeathed her own features to him, would also be her own.

If she denounced him to his father and brothers, brother-in-law, denounced the woman his wife to the daughters, and the daughter-in-law who would receive it as a triumph against the honour of the family?

What happened behind the closed door of the room where the wife was already lying — any woman who had lived long enough to know men and women could be in no doubt. And how at ease her son was now, the relaxation of a certain kind recognized by an old woman who had slept beside a man for many years.

How would her son be dealt with by the men of the family. The couple — what would happen to them. But she knew, she knew what would happen. Ibrahim would not take disgrace from anyone here, such edicts were bearings cast loose, their authority over sons lost in the alien authority of exile, emigration — that she knew.

Her brother. If his Uncle Yaqub were told. And of course he would be informed, the senior and most important member of the family. And he was the only one she privately could have hoped might offer help for her son to stay instead of seeking another emigration. When Yaqub was informed; what would happen.

She knew what would happen.

Her son would leave somehow, for somewhere, lost to her in the world once again.

No-one had been in the house. Only she. She had not heard — no — the woman, his wife, enter and go to the lean-to, she had been at prayer. It was only he, her son, whose presence or absence she was always aware of, coming or going. Her daughter Maryam did not know that her brother had come and gone during the afternoon, occupied a bedroom with his wife.

What would happen to her, the mother, if she spoke to no-one of what she knew — no-one.

Aoodhu billah. If she took the sin upon herself, as if she assumed the distorted visage of the beloved face only she knew was evident. Astaghfar allah. If he is disgraced, nothing will stop him. He will leave. She will lose him again. Any punishment, in sha allah, rather than that.

When one of the men lightly remarks upon her son’s disappearance from the company of the men in the course of the afternoon, she responds before he could. — He needs rest.—

She, Julie, was apprehensive about the family meal after sunset, what had she done to him; would he not — both of them not — be shamed to take part, he among the men, she among the women. But he returned from the mosque with his father, Ahmad, Daood, Amina’s husband Suliman and young Muhammad, and greeted her as if he had not seen her since morning.