The Pickup

Chapter 29

The Bedouin woman can be seen only in the early hours. (Maryam, when asked as a matter of casual curiosity from a foreigner, says she must be Bedouin, they have their tents and their goats somewhere out there.)

She goes to sit on the stump of masonry in the hours when he is at the Uncle’s workshop, the father of the family away on the benches outside coffee shops where he conducts whatever it is occupies him, the brothers at work and the children in school. The women — except Maryam, cleaning her employer’s house — are cooking, watching television or praying— she understands: prayer is the only form of rest his mother allows herself.

No-one would notice her absence. Although it is not proper to go about to the market or shops unless accompanied by one of the sisters or, at least, a couple of children, just to the end of the street apparently does not count. Neighbours, who drop in and out of the family house to visit, are accustomed to her presence among them and greet her if they see her pass; a corner of curtain may be lifted, dropped again: she cannot be going anywhere or to do anything of interest; this direction of the street ends in the desert.

She wears an old khaki hat from camping days with the EL-AY Café crowd which fortunately she dropped into the elegant suitcase when looking around for what just might be useful, before she left the cottage and all non-essentials. The heat tends to collect beneath the dark green cotton brim, adequate protection where she came from, but not here; when she reached her place on the relic of a habitation she would take out of her shirt pocket a sleazy scarf bought in the market and drape it over the hat to her shoulders — people here knew that the sun was an enemy not to be exposed to as a sensuous benefice on Cape Town beaches. The Bedouin hidden in the wisdom of her black wraps was safe from melanoma, alone with her goats in the desert.

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing— not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.

What could/would thrust this back into time? Water.

An ice age — if that were to come. Water is a lost memory: memory the passing proof of time’s existence.

Ice to cover the sands and melt them back into time with its own melting, over millennia. Drinking an ice age; after the ages when all life-juices had dried away to purity — only that which is inactive can attain purity. Nullity is purity; detachment from the greedy stirring of growth. Eternity is purity; what lasts is not alive.

When the ice age melts, this will be forced to become again: become the vast grassland it was how many thousand years ago?

Buried under sand the insistence of a broken line of words surfaces to disturb her quiet mind … ‘and she conceived … and retired with him to a far-off place.’

She woke, and with her arm limply open-palmed flung across his breast, eyes still closed, smiling, mumbled something.

I dreamed green.

He doesn’t ask what she does with herself all day — the English lessons, all right … He did not know of her hours with the desert; she didn’t tell him, because he avoided, ignored, shunned the desert. (Are you crazy?)

Yes green. If we don’t get out of here soon she won’t stand it much longer, this dusty hell of my place. She’ll go back there. The big trees round her cottage. The grass a black man came to cut. Her kind; that Café. The beautiful terrace for lunch on Sunday. Permanent Residence: so many applications, so many ways, any kind of way, tried, for that status anywhere. Anywhere but here. If she had been one of the ways snatched at when he gave his smile in response to her attraction to him that day in the garage (or was it only on the street), if she had failed him, failed the influence he had counted on through her secure status of birth, whiteness, family position, money, if it didn’t achieve any right for his Permanent Residence in her country — she had come (didn’t she say it) all the way with him; the way of refusal, failure, buried back here in the cursed village in the sand, his home, that claimed him. Love. He had to believe it, existing in her. He felt something unwanted, something it was not necessary, no obligation on a penniless illegal to feel for one of those who own the world, can buy a ticket, get on a plane, present a passport and be welcomed back into that world any time, she will go, with tears and embraces, one last wonderful coupling on the iron bed, any week now; he felt responsibility — that’s it — responsibility for her. Though he had none; he had not wanted her to come here, she would not let go of him and he could hardly have told her that her purpose in his life was ended. So he even married her; had to, couldn’t take her to his mother as if she were some whore he’d picked up in his loneliness; if he brought his mother, who deserved everything, an obviously high-class wife (even if a foreigner outside the Faith), this was at least some mark of her son’s worth recognized where he wandered.

One of those elaborate gifts brought home that are not what is needed, put away in a lean-to. He cursed himself with some old remembered malediction.

She dreams green. But the thought of the lean-to, without her, the strangeness and intimacy of her, hollowed him out with the deep breath it made him take, all through his body, limbs and hands.

She had been smiling to herself, only half out of sleep, at the idea of having somehow mistakenly dreamed in green, a crossed line from the old subconscious store of landscapes, when she had in fact fallen asleep by transporting herself into the pale radiance of the desert entered that afternoon, beyond the colour and time of growth.

On a morning, he also woke from a dream. He couldn’t recall what it was; behind closed eyes, he too put out a hand. There was the flat empty space. Suddenly, that was the dream, it had happened: gone.

Out to buy fritters.