The Pickup

Chapter 28

Sometimes his mood — when he came into the room where she was among the women or in the lean-to amusing Khadija’s and Amina’s children with games unearthed from memories of Gulliver’s garden — showed that Canada was going well. Other days he would glare round at his sisters and desolate sister-in-law as if at a flock to be shooed away, or say to the children in the language he shared with them — goodbye, out, go! — play somewhere else!

There would have been frustration; no news at the consulate, the failure of a promised contact to materialize. He and she did not talk much about these inevitabilities of waiting; there was an unspoken pact of feeling that this would be somehow a way of attracting bad luck, as if some force were hanging over them, eavesdropping, grinning, tantalizing, holding out closed fists — which one? which one? — enjoying a knowledge that the one reached out for contained: visa refused. Why raise her hopes. Why answer questions about what he was ready to resort to, to get them out of this place. Just do it. Whatever it might be. Any day he might find the elegant suitcase packed. In her hand one ticket this time. Week after week passing; the sight of his sister-in-law, the woman Khadija, so haughtily accusatory of the family who had produced her husband, incensed him. Her mannerism of suddenly covering her well-made-up face with her hands, her nervous tic of despair. What the hell was bloody Zayd doing at the fucking oil fields! (The expletives heard at the garage where his wife had picked him up came back to him in their language.) Yes, that’s it. Fucking, he’s found another woman there, and my mother has to feed the grand wife from the capital he was so proud of, my father has to pay and send his children to school.

Who would have thought they would still be here when the wind months came. The rih is blowing.

He comes back from wherever it is the friends-of-friends take him with what they calculate is probably the right sum of her dollars to place in an opened hand, and there she is wrapped up with a robe round her head like any village woman in the street. She smiles an acknowledgment at Maryam: Wasn’t it good of your little sister to kit me out for the wind? She drew the covering over her mouth and nose to show him how well she had been protected from the cutting fury of flaying sand on the way to the ladies’ conversational tea at the house of Maryam’s employer, for which she had now agreed to modest payment.

He was shouting at his sister, some of the words could be understood as a result of those tea-parties: who do you think you are what are you doing who walks out in the rih are you mad take that thing off her, and the gentle girl was swaying this way and that as if she were being slapped.

He disappeared into the lean-to. Julie put her arms round the girl and rocked with her. Maryam struggled free and pulled the robe away from Julie, who was incantatory, apologizing for him, Sorry, sorry, sorry. But the girl comforted her in Arabic and then, correcting herself, in English, licking away a tear that had run down her cheek to her lip and chokingly laughing at herself: —He has many worry — he is too busy with hard things. I know that. It is not me. Ibrahim — he — is angry for him not for me. — The two with their arms again about each other sat on the sofa quietly as if Ibrahim’s wife were a sister.

Of course he’s right about the wind; even with the entire outfit women and even men wore, just their eyes showing, venturing out in that wind was terrifying, exciting — something never experienced before, beyond imagining back where the most intense experience of this force of nature was the wind called Black South-Easter that slammed doors and kept you off the beaches on Cape Town holidays. This was the reality of the cosmic blasts issuing from mouths of angry gods symbolized in prophetic engravings. It’s not often, now, waiting for Canada or wherever it’s going to be — with him, that’s all that matters — she thinks of the childhood where she did have the room with the plush panda she had wandered to find in the wrong house, that Sunday; of the revamped servant’s quarters with gleaming bathroom, organic soap and bath oils, miniature kitchen with suitably modest freezer and microwave, weekly washwoman, wide ever-ready bed for whoever the latest lover might be: trappings of the coterie of the alternative to Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sunday lunches, The Table at the EL-AY Café—what was supposed to be the simple life. We were playing at reality; it was a doll’s house, the cottage; a game, the EL-AY Café.

The wind to which everything and everyone in the village was submitted blew itself out after exactly the months she was told it would. Its time was over; Canada still in the balance, there were decisions to come from the final authority in Ottawa. Julie knew that he had other initiatives out for the possibility of other countries; but what countries would be left to try. It ceased to be a question: an unspoken statement, conclusive. (That’s it.) He was away more and more from the family house, driving the old car to the capital — an Uncle is not a stranger, a sister’s son cannot be denied time off like any employee — spending the evenings in the village or perhaps another village, with the friends who knew contacts to follow up. The father and other men of the family were also usually out in the evenings; Amina’s husband Suliman, Daood the coffee-maker, Ahmad who worked at the butchery, and even schoolboy Muhammad, his cheese delivery round concluded, homework overseen by the mother, disappeared to kick a football with other boys under the dim bat-circled street-lights. It was a quiet time in this house that reverberated with many lives; the small children in bed, the women waiting for the men. The sisters Maryam and Amina would be talking dreamily as they endlessly knotted a carpet — or was it the next carpet — on a handmade loom, not much more than two young trees stripped of bark and branches, crossed by rough beams. She sat with the women watching subtitled American soap operas, left carefully, not to disturb, as if along the row in a cinema, to read under the lamp he had provided for her in the lean-to. Sometimes Maryam came hesitantly after her, and settled with legs crossed under her garment on the floor beside the bed where she lounged. Maryam had made extraordinary progress; they could talk now, exchange ideas beyond phrase-book pleasantries; even confidences. Did Maryam want to marry? The police commissioner’s son: did she love him?

The girl showed her clamped teeth, softly giggled, dropped her head back. — I don’t know any other one. Only my father, my brothers. He looks a nice man. He speaks well. And he is not fat — you know — I would not want a fat one. — They laughed together; the girl shuddered, as if in some imagined embrace. — I think I can love him, we’ll see. — She had anecdotes about and reflections on the other women. They all talked of Khadija, so annoying and yet so shaming in her hostile despair. Yes, a pain in the neck … but that was a colloquialism hard to explain to Maryam … — Poor Khadija. She was — what do you say — awful, oh awful before, when my brother Zayd was here with her, when they got married and he brought her from her parents, she did not like our house, she was the one who said he must go to the oil fields for money to buy a house for her. Now she is — more awful— because she is so unhappy. She looks at you like this, she hates because she is jealous. You have your husband, your husband will take you to a good country, you have money. Poor Khadija. In this house no person likes her. And my brother …? Does he still want her. We don’t know. If he doesn’t come back?—

— But the children are lovely. Your father and mother like having the children with them.—

The girl was silent for a while, considering the threshold between gossip and causing offence. She opened her pretty face to Ibrahim’s wife, the half-known, half-mysterious, about to tell something. — The others, they wonder why you do not get a baby. Then perhaps you will first marry here, our way. They look at you. We talk about it. And now — I must say to you … My mother has asked. She asks me.—

It was understood: Maryam has been told by the mother to inform me that she expects me to produce a child.

It must be passed off lightly. — There are plenty of grand-children, Khadija’s, Amina’s just had another, now you will have babies too.—

— My mother thinks of a child from Ibrahim.—

She glides out of contact with his back, out of the bed, awake very early. Perhaps it’s a new habit left over from the hours of Ramadan. She puts on jeans and a shirt over bare breasts, picks up sandals, slips out of the house with them in her hand. He’s always saying, as if drily repeating an adage, you can only live in the early morning in this place, his home, but he never wakes to do so — during the ritual rising before dawn one of the brothers had to come and thump on the lean-to door. She squats beside the empty blue urn to wriggle her toes into the sandals. It is true that the air is a pure element to walk out into, as different from the element of midday as it is to immerse oneself, move from dry land to water. The rih has sandpapered the shapes of habitations, the sky; there is the stillness of perfect clarity. She takes a walk, just down the street, accompanied for a few minutes by one of those cowed dogs who know they are despised in this village. Although she has not threatened it, it turns from her and runs away. She has come to the sudden end of the street: there is the desert. Its immensity has put a stop to the houses, the people: go no farther with your belching cars, your bleary lights in the majesty of darkness, your street vendors and broadcast babble; go no further in your aspirations.

There was a clump of masonry a few yards out into the sand, the remains of something that had been built and fallen down, there, interred. She began to make for it and there was yet another element entered; the chill of the desert, night-cooled sand sifting through the straps of the sandals to lave her feet. She sat on the broken remnant of wall and looked— if it can be said the eyes are looking at no fixed object, no horizon to be made out. The sands are immobile. She tried to think it was like gazing out of the window of a plane into space, but then there is always a wisp of cloud that comes across and creates scale. After a while there was an object— objects — which quickly drew into focus, black marks, spots before the eyes? — and as they grew became a woman enveloped in black herding a small straggle of goats. She came only near enough into vision for a staff she was wielding to be made out, taking her goats in another direction. In search of pasture. Here? This space undisturbed by growth, even while you lift and place your feet it obliterates where they fall and covers their interruption as they pass on. The spots before the eyes were gone. She suddenly thought of a glass of water, wanted it. And the need was strange. When you thirst, in the sands, water takes on a new meaning: it’s an element that has no place. She sat a while, hadn’t put on her watch, and then walked back to where the street began, with the feeling of being seen off, although there was nobody. The street was coming to life. The electronic call to prayer wound out from the direction of the mosque and from one of the houses there was the sprightly beguiling voice of a radio commercial. The vendor of fritters was coming towards her and she found, as she hoped, some coins in her jeans and bought a few, pleasingly warm in their wisp of paper, to her hand, as the cool of the sand had been to her feet.

What is this.

He gestured at the sight of her, up and dressed. He lay flushed with sleep under his dark-honey-coloured skin, black shining eyes shadowed in blue hollows, melancholy or erotic. Here I am.

Here to come back to from a desert just on the doorstep.

Out to buy fritters. Look, still hot. She waved the fragrant disks at him.

Ibrahim was shaving. The hot water came from a kettle he had bought that worked off an extension cord from the house handy Ahmad had rigged up, which also served for the fan he’d bought, and the lamp for her to read by — each appliance could be used only when the others were disconnected, and there were hours when the village electricity failed: cold water, darkness. The paraffin burners were the resort of the household; nobody went hungry, the slaughterer brother had his bath water heated for him by his mother in the customary way, and Ibrahim’s wife, inducted to women’s work now, waited patiently for her turn to fetch his; oil lamps turned the house into a shadowy cave of shelter.

He opened his mouth wide, high and taut, and shaved at the corners under the two glossy tresses of moustache. Open on his beautiful teeth, this was like a variation of his rare and awaited smile. He raised eyebrows in enquiry: she was watching him?

They wonder why we don’t have a baby.

He goes on shaving the delicate area. The aura of his presence that she has known so well from the first day, contracts in withdrawal; she’s come to know that, too.

Who wonders that.

Your mother wants a child from you.

She has not said it, but he sees, he knows, she is suddenly taken with the idea. Another adventure.

What do we want with a child. We are not Zayd and Suliman and the lot. We will be gone. What a way to make a start, you sick, giving birth, a little baby to look after.

Is she reproaching him through his mother.

Are you crazy? And the moment spoken, he feels its cruelty stab back at him. He throws the razor onto the towel, holds his breath and plunges his face to the bowl of steaming water. When he lifts his head, she has taken up the razor and offers the towel. As he dries his face it is as if the whole exchange has also evaporated. Everything as before, as every morning in the existence of waiting; suspended. He goes off to help out at the vehicle workshop that, within the support of the family system, provides a little money (he’s now being paid) and the use of a car. She has come to be accepted as one of the women who share household tasks, and she makes use of her education to teach English to schoolchildren and anyone else in the village — word has gone round, there are more and more who would like to improve their chances in what (he has said) is the world. Sometimes, recalling public-relations-speak over a cellphone which used to be attached to her like the tag on the leg of a homing pigeon, she thinks it’s the first time that expensive education has been put to use.