The Pickup

Chapter 34

Almost a year since they arrived at his home. She was fully occupied now. Strange; she had never worked like this before, without reservations of self, always had been merely trying out this and that, always conscious that she could move on, any time, to something else, not expecting satisfaction, looking on at herself, half-amusedly, as an ant scurrying god knows where. In addition to the ladies’ conversational circle, the lessons for other adults who sought her out, and the play-learning she discovered she could devise (probably started with Leila) for small children, as well as the classes she taught in the primary school, she had been drawn in to coach English to older boys who hoped to go to high school in the capital some day; she had been able to persuade — flatter — the local school principal to let girls join the classes although it was more than unlikely their families would allow them to leave home.

She performed such unskilled tasks as she could be expected to be able to do, among her sisters-in-law, in the preparation of family meals. The mother directed everything, she was obeyed as the guardian of all culinary knowledge and dietary edicts, the ingredients she chose and the methods of preparation she decreed were followed. The ingredients of the food were simple but they were combined and transformed into something subtly delicious, the so-named pilaffs and other ‘ethnic’ dishes fiercely spiced in the alternative cuisine favoured at The Table turned out to have had nothing to do with these. Amazing what you could produce on two paraffin burners. Apparently the mother noted her interest; perhaps a sign of other recognition from the heights of her black-robed dignity, began to call Ibrahim’s wife over and show her, with a gesture authorizing her to try for herself the procedures by which preparation of food, as it should be, were to be performed. The mother smiled — Ibrahim’s smile — when she saw how this privilege of her cuisine and lessons were enjoyed. Occasionally she pronounced (like a ventriloquist’s projection) a few words in English; the exchange with his wife’s halting Arabic might in time even extend to conversation lessons in the kitchen? Amina and Maryam laughed encouragement to her over pots and knives when she spoke to them in their language. In the evenings they were beginning to discuss plans for Maryam’s wedding, not so distant, and Maryam liked her to be there with them, translating for her and looking to her for approval, from the outside world, of the style of the event previewed. In projection of the days of celebration both set aside that Julie would not be there, any more, then. Canada, Australia; wherever this brother, who persisted in pressing for entry, again and again, no matter how many times rejected, would take her away.

Leila had her by the hand.

After the child came home from school and had eaten, neither her mother nor her playmates expected to see her. The child slipped into the lean-to to find if Julie, too, were back home; looked for her where she might be reading under the awning if it were not too hot. When Julie went to the house of Maryam’s employer for the conversational teas, Leila (the first time with her mother’s permission requested) came along. She sat silently, nibbled cake silently. Ibrahim’s wife loves children, the ladies enthused; she had never had anything to do with children, not since the Gulliver games, childhood itself — that had been left behind with The Suburbs. There was another construction — perception of herself formed in — by — this village that was his home. There had been a number in her life; she could sum up — the well-brought-up girl with her panda who would marry a well-brought-up polo player from her father’s club; the public relations gal with personality plus, set to make a career; the acolyte of the remnant hippie community, rehash resurrected from the era they had been a generation too young to belong to; experiences, all; none definitive of herself, by herself. So far. Only the day she stood in the doll’s house and showed him two airline tickets.

Leila by the hand. So small a folding of little bones and flesh-pads it might be just some talisman in her palm. Leila came like this with her to the desert. Nobody missed the child. Nobody knew where they had gone, went as the day cooled; when they returned to the house everyone assumed, as the child hadn’t been seen about, the two had been playing games again in the lean-to; Leila loved the games with coloured pegs and counters Julie had had sent from a shop in London, along with an order of books — she wanted Ibrahim to rig up a shelf for her, could he?

Pack them, you will take them with us.

She and the child walked to the end of the street. Not speaking; Leila sang very softly to herself. Their footsteps had a rhythm and counter-rhythm because Julie’s steps were longer and the child took two to her one. Then there was the sand. Muffling; it sank in, between their toes; they left no trail, it ended in the street, the village dropped behind. They sat together, hand in hand — the desert was too far and wide for the child — as the sun, also, left them and such shadows as they caused in the vastness blurred away. Sometimes the stray dog appeared; what was it he found in the desert, as the woman’s flock of goats found pasture; but this was not the place of questions to be asked of oneself or answered. Sometimes the child leaned her head and might have dropped asleep; children have an exhausting life, you only remember that when you teach in school. Sometimes hand in hand they moved a short way into the desert from the stump of masonry, a smooth dragging gait imposed by depth of sand, and sat down, cross-legged both of them, in the sand. It sifted up, sidled round their backsides, her fleshy one and the child’s neat bones. Go farther and even that undulating scarf of sound, the muezzin’s call from the mosque, is taken in, out of hearing. But she doesn’t go farther, with the child.

It is in the very early morning that she goes out into the desert alone; although — she couldn’t explain and does not want to delve, in the dialogue all beings have within themselves — even with the child she is alone in the sense of not accompanied by what was always with her, part of herself, back wherever the past was. The books she had ordered and that had come, once again, in the care of the bus driver from the capital, made her giggle or abandon half-read — that woman Hester Stanhope, and the man Lawrence, English charades in the desert, imperialism in fancy dress with the ultimate condescension of bestowing the honour of wanting to be like the people of the desert. Another game, another repertoire like that in the theatre company of the EL-AY Café, but with serious consequences, apparently, for the countries where the man had been. Nothing to do with her; she wrapped herself in black robes only when it was necessary for protection against the wind.

On their lean-to bed he slept, mysteriously calm in that familiar other lone region, and if he had awakened while she was gone, did not ask, when she was in the room again, where she had been.

Reading, while it was still cool under the awning. Out to buy fritters. His conscious mood was distracted and concentrated: distracted from her, from their doubled existence, and concentrated on whatever new tactics he was in the process of engaging with authority. What they might be, she did not ask either; she was somehow afraid that what she’d been told again and again by Maryam, by the ladies at the conversational teas, would be read in her face: all said matter-of-factly it sometimes took several years before permission to enter another country might at last be achieved. This was the commonplace experience of relatives and friends.

She walked through night-cooled sands into the desert. No fear of getting lost; she could always return herself from the desert, turn her back and verify the signal finger-beckon of the minaret; the houses flocked together behind her. The goats with the Bedouin woman appeared before her in the desert as if conjured up. She would walk what seemed a long way towards her and her goats but the measure of distance in this element and space was unaccustomed; the figures of woman and animals retreated although they had appeared to be only slowly veering, changing direction. There was one morning when they were discovered close; close enough to be advanced to. The woman turned out to be hardly more than a child — perhaps twelve years old. For a few moments the desert opened, the two saw each other, the woman under her bushveld hat, the girl-child a pair of keen eyes from a small figure swathed against the sun.

She smiled but the other responded only by the eyes’ acknowledgment of a presence.

The encounter without word or gesture became a kind of daily greeting; recognition. After which she would sit on, in the sands, and forget the Bedouin girl and the goats; or, sometimes summoned in an old habit of focus, would follow their eclipse like slowed film footage in which the closing of a flower at night may be followed.

The dog lost its fear of her. It swung its tail if she were sitting on the stump of masonry but did not accompany her if she went farther than a few yards into the desert; it came to the stump as part of the dregs of the village, to forage the rubbish tossed against the traces of someone who had tested the limits of habitation and been overcome.

At last, she was in the capital. Where, when they first arrived, she had wanted to ‘see everything’, as if ‘everything’ were to be known there; before they had occupied the grand marital bed and moved to the lean-to, before love-making on the vocal springs of the iron bedstead, before they had stayed through Ramadan and the season of wind, before she began to exchange the sound of one language for another, discover you could do something other than write advertising copy or arrange pop singers’ itineraries.

I never got round to going with you.

Half a question.

But he was the one who had decided that. When the suggestion had come from her: What will you do there, standing in offices. And she had stayed behind and — he saw it — occupied herself in the meantime for which he was not responsible. He had done and was doing everything possible to get them out of this place. And every time something, someone, brought to his mind the offer of his Uncle, the trap that was set to snap on him by the family, his mother the beloved — his body swelled with the blood of accusation and rage, a distress that gave him an erection, and that with a confusion of shame and desire, using her, could only be assuaged in wild love-making which she took for something else, so little did she know, in her kind of existence, emotions of the kind of survival you have to fight for, in this place.

Photographs and documents were sufficient as a general practice for him to submit on behalf of an individual such as her, a wife with credentials enough to make her an acceptable immigrant anywhere. Desirable even; one with connections that mean money. But at a certain stage he didn’t explain — so much bureaucracy, in whose ways he is expert — consulates must see the applicant’s wife in person, verifying the photographs and asking questions already replied to over and over in documentation.

The visa sections of consulates and the offices of honorary consuls — the country is not considered important enough, by some countries, to have a more formal diplomatic mission— are a scene and dialogue repeated in each. The script does not change, she learnt now at first hand, after having known it only recounted by him when she would ask for news; the premises may be equipped to impress or intimidate with chairs in a waiting area, informative brochures, framed texts from national poets and politicians in some, at others only queues proceeding under gruff orders, but all have large portraits of the head of state, President or Royal, gazing down at the young men who replicate her own standing beside her, and women hung about with babies and children who look at her, and then away, as if it can’t be that she is there among them. At one of the consulates an official of some other Oriental origin, posted by a country of the West as perhaps likely to deal best with fellow Orientals, questions her with the regard of distaste: the way this glance compares her with the husband she has chosen shows that the choice, the world being the way it is, is inexplicable. Flanked by swags of the Stars and Stripes flag and a bronze eagle on a standard, a friendly black American official draws back from her papers with a laugh — You really from Africa?—

It was right to have spared her the tedium of all this. She had waited at the dentist’s or the doctor’s, but never before had she shuffled along in a queue in hope to gain a right— that had been the history of blacks in her country, but she’s white, Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ daughter, yes. And even when she took herself off to live in the doll’s house, the only queue she might stand in with the mates from The Table was to gain entry to a cinema. That’s it, for her; in the press of supplicant-applicants, she slid her hand behind her to take the hand of hers, among them. He whispered to her ear (his smile in the tone), That fellow, he thinks you should be black.

She saw how impossible it was to tell, from the manner of the petty official you didn’t get past to anyone more influential, whether your application had a chance or not; whether your credentials, your reasons for leaving your country, your justification for expecting to be received by the one you were applying to enter, were the ones likely to be received favourably — at least considered before the rubber stamp fell against you.

The doors of consulates closed on the queues, before noon prayers. When the morning was over there was the city she had wanted to explore, getting off the plane as if it had been one of those destinations of holiday anticipation. But what they both were in need of now was something to quench thirst and satisfy hunger. They walked and walked, the thickets of vehicles and collision with bodies, the ricochet of shouts, calls, vehemence of voices echoed from shop-fronts, buildings, strung through by the cries from mosques, close by and distant, like undersea calls of mythical creatures. In this assault that is a city, the confrontation she had faced when she got out of her car in another city, there are, of course, what are called amenities to enjoy that don’t exist in a village. If a McDonald’s is to be included in the category, they passed one. Then there was a restaurant that also looked as it might have done in any city, closed off from the frenzies of the streets, potted plant either side of a handsome carved door. He was in a good mood, Ibrahim, perhaps it was a comfort to have a companion for once, on his routine quest.

How do I know this place? Uncle Yaqub one day brought me here.

They laughed: to prepare the favoured nephew for the kind of life he was to be offered. The laughter was as near as she and Ibrahim had ever got to referring to that offer again.

The restaurant was air-conditioned, the temperature of some other country; the food succulent and served gracefully by young men. She remarked on this service with appreciation; silently following the waiters’ glide about tables, he saw in them likely rivals, brothers, yes, in the queue for visas. No wine, here, of course. Sorry for that.

I don’t care. Everything’s delicious — but even though it’s so elaborate, it isn’t any better than your mother makes at home.

They paid in dollars left over from the fee due at a consulate. The alley-way bazaars they passed, the street stalls— these were selling much the same sort of thing as in the village market, only more of it, and the shops displayed among tinselled robes, gold-framed mirrors and curlicued furniture familiar from the house of the Uncle and of Maryam’s employer, the even more familiar international choice of Nike boots, cellphones, TV consoles, hi-fi and video equipment. The mosques — but did she really want to see government buildings and mosques? It’s only the walls, anyway, you know they won’t let you go inside. Then they came to a cinema complex that was a fair example of such a concept anywhere. They had not seen a film since The Table had trooped together from the EL-AY Café to a Brazilian film festival at an art house. Of the film posters’ giant gaze outside this complex, most faces were unknown to her and although the names of actors were familiar to him, did not attract him. They saw a James Bond film, subtitled, his choice. If they did not hold hands as she had done with other lovers (he retained some of the sexual decorum of the village) she kept her hand on his thigh while they sat comfortably together in the dust-mote dark. If the mosque and the church have been left behind somewhere in life, the cinema can be a place of meditation. As in a place of worship, the one prostrate, forehead to the floor, the one on the knees, neither knows in what the person beside him or her is lost.

Next time he went to the capital there was no need for her to go along with him — he said. On his return in the early afternoon he did not come to his mother’s house but to the vehicle workshop, took off the tie and jacket every applicant, poor devils like himself, queueing at a consulate wore as proof of respectability, and pulled himself into the stiff mould of greasy jeans that hung on the wall; the Uncle must have his money’s worth from his ungrateful nephew, disgrace to the family. When he came home to the lean-to she was lying on the floor — he often found her reading there, studying her Arabic, stretched on her belly for coolness; now she was cleaning sand from between her toes. She looked up and saw: no news. That night she began to caress him, down the silky hair of his chest to his groin, but he did not rouse to her hand, he was tense in some other state of concentration. She had the odd vision of his mother when at prayer.

She lay angry, resentful at the officialdom, the requirements and provisos and quibbles of smug petty functionaries who had the power to induce these states of tension in him. And what for? What was it all for? The Uncle, the family, had said of that world that shut him out, didn’t even want him reduced to a grease-monkey — yes, they had said it, and at the time she had had to stifle a derisive splutter of laughter — Isn’t it enough to have a cellphone and TV? Wasn’t that more than enough of it? What else is really worth having out there in the world of false gods?