The Pickup

Chapter 35

She was given the day. Maryam’s idea.

What Maryam called her ‘wish’; the father was to make one of his infrequent visits to the oasis where he had his connection with a relative who grew rice. Maryam asked that she and Julie might go with him.

Would there be no objection from the father? Perhaps he would prefer not to present the foreign daughter-in-law.

No, no, Maryam had told him Ibrahim’s wife wished to see something of the country before Ibrahim left again, took her away.

Only … she, Maryam, would have to get permission from her employer to absent herself from her daily work. Her face pleated in embarrassment of presumption at the request: —You ask her, she’ll give me the day. — So at the next conversational tea Julie told the lady of the house that she had the opportunity of a little outing (an English colloquialism for the gathering to remember) and wanted Maryam to keep her company. Permission was granted immediately.

The father borrowed his son Ibrahim’s car. Rather, it was the son who insisted on this. Julie, you can’t go driving around in his old wreck, it breaks down everywhere. Time my Uncle gave a new one my mother can be safe in, anyway.

Would be, not can.

The teacher ran a hand over his hair, with the correction; he complained she helped everyone improve their English except him, to whom it was important.

You are crazy, in this heat, the desert.

I know. I know.

Maryam did not like to tell her to cover her head for this expedition, but brought along an enveloping scarf for her as a gentle instruction rather than an indication that she should have decided to wear something adequate of her own. A man accompanied the father in the front seat, and the two young women sat at the back. — It’s all right for you? — Maryam whispered concern for comfort to be provided on her little expedition.

The two men talked all the way without pause, their language so voluble that a beginner, though making progress, caught nothing but the obeisance in sha allah and others she understood.

The road ventured out into the desert, the road parted the desert with the thin accompaniment, on either side, of lone outbreaks of small stores, repair yards of undefinable nature in their clutter of disparate wreckage, coffee stalls where men from nowhere sat and a few goats cropped among detritus of torn plastic and cigarette packs; but it was not the desert she came to herself; was received by. In passing stretches it was stony; the outcrop bones of dwellings, bones of animals and humans it had submerged, bared to the surface, like the stump of masonry where she sat on the house it had overcome. The desert withdrew from the interruption of the road; even when the road became hardly more than parallel grooves ground by the passage of vehicles in the sand that flowed over its surface. The experience of the desert she had anticipated from Maryam’s expedition was refused her.

In the name of God If God wills it

Perhaps it was the cocoon of noise which enclosed Maryam and her; the loud to-and-fro talk between the men, bound by winding plaints of car radio music that had the same cadence as their language, and the engine groan of the Uncle’s hand-me-down car. Hot, yes, if there had once been air-conditioning in the car, it didn’t work. But Maryam had a local inhabitant’s ability to rest back in the palpable heat, and she had learnt from her not to resist but to do the same.

They did not come upon the destination suddenly. At the sides of their track there glinted what might be a fragment of tin catching the glare, a shard of broken glass shining. But then there was continuity in the shine: water, shallow threads of water. And something like weeds, though not the tough flourishing wayfarer weeds in countries where there is rain. There were palms. At last. A group of camels rested on legs articulated beneath them, their heads rising like periscopes. They must have been hobbled; one struggled to stand with a lower front leg roped back at the knee to its upper half. She had forgotten how she had visualized postcard palm trees, back there. Now they came to a village only a little more formal and extensive, with its mosque, than sparse roadside occupation. The visitors were received in a palm courtyard where offices, like the image of another world (back there) entered through a television screen, had two young men seated at computers, a young woman, wearing the chador but with pursed thighs revealed by a gauzy skirt, used the intercom to announce an arrival in the seductive corporate voice.

The father’s collateral connection came from an inner office slowly, as if the visit were something unavoidable rather than welcome. He was a foreshortened man, the compression of whose aspect created the impression of concentrated ability. The father looked loose-limbed and flabby-bellied, before him; a wordless vis-à-vis of their relative positions in a common fate. She saw that Maryam was sensitive to this graphic statement, distressed, on behalf of her father, to be reminded of what everyone knew but was not confronted with like this: he was dependent on what was hardly more than the charity of this man, for whatever his minor function in the man’s affairs might be.

Maryam caught up and held breath while greetings were exchanged. Mr Muhammad Aboulkanim showed no surprise or curiosity when the European woman wearing a headscarf was presented to him, a wife the son Ibrahim must have picked up somewhere in emigration; the wife saw that this was to make clear to the father that this patron had done for him all he could be expected to, no question of his having any interest in the affairs of his distant relative’s family — if that were some idea of bringing the woman along. But the father was accustomed to dealing in a certain dignity with rebuffs from this man as from his wife’s brother, Uncle Yaqub. He asked whether, once business was over, they could show Ibrahim’s wife how rice grows ‘in our dry country’.

Aboulkanim had the women and the father’s friend served coffee and glasses of iced water while he ushered the father to his inner office past lowered eyelids and clamped lips.

The three sat on steel-framed, jouncing chairs in the style of office furnishings fifty years ago, and Maryam replied to the secretary’s bright questions with schoolgirl obedience. The friend smoked and eyed the door of the inner office as if he could monitor whether tactics discussed all the way in the car were being pursued by the father, behind there.

Mr Aboulkanim drove them in his own car to the rice field. The father sat beside him; there was in his voice a tone that conveyed to those seated behind that his interview in the inner office had not gone badly; which was to say, nothing changed: he still had his connection.

For half-an-hour a road ignored by the desert led them as before; in vast spaces of the planet Earth like these the road is one road, not multiplied by alternatives. The father talked volubly as he had in the to-and-fro with the friend, although his patron merely grunted or cleared his throat of mucus in response, the radio was babbling news to which nobody listened, part of the smooth function of the handsome German car. In air-conditioned chill the pores on her arms contracted to goose-flesh; but Maryam pulled a little happy grimace and drew her nostrils to take in the coolness as if to store it prudently for the heat beyond the windows.

And then the road ended and there was a low cement-block building with a large efficient-looking pit before it where there were pumps and other heavy machinery whose purpose women would not know. The patron addressed Maryam with an explanation as if the other woman brought along were not there. Maryam translated softly. This is where the water is controlled and the rice is — the word she was looking for was understood: threshed. A barefoot worker, eagle-faced and blackened by the sun, stood by silently, breathing with open mouth like a patient attendant dog.

But she was gazing in concentrated distraction on what was suddenly there before her with its own-drawn close limit of horizon and dazzling density, man-high, what seemed to be meshed slender silky reeds, green, green, green. A kind of wooden walkway offered itself — dank water glancing between planks — and she turned away from the others and took it. The intoxication of green she entered was audible as well as visual, the twittering susurration of a great company of birds clinging, woven into the green as they fed; their tremble, balance, sway, passing through it continuously like rippling breeze, a pitch of song as activity, activity as song, filled her head. The desert is mute; in the middle of the desert there is this, the infinite articulacy: pure sound. Where else could that be? That coexistence of wonder. A break in the rice-canes, just at the side of the walkway; a low private glaze of fallow water. A heron awaited her there, standing; she paused and stood; the bird dipped its beak. Ringingly deafened with the music of this sphere she did not hear human voices calling to her and took her own time to make her way back.

She had kept them waiting, the patron’s eyes were hidden by sunglasses, but the set of his mouth made that clear. They were lined up as if for a photograph; indeed, it was for a photograph. The father’s friend was trying out focus with an instant-delivery camera. She was placed between her husband’s father and Maryam; then Maryam posed her just before the building on the concrete surface where rice had spilled. — Pick up, please, go on, in your hands — Maryam laughed and mimed.

She scooped a handful of slippery husks and sifted them through her fingers, smiling, the friend stepped back a pace, forward again, and the picture was taken. The coloured print came rolling out, he waved it a moment and gave it to her.

On the return journey the father and his friend included Maryam in their exchange, expansive under the influence of the lushness they had come close to, as if they had been drinking. Maryam would not let her be left out, and translated. — They’re saying it can be possible, they can buy some part where there is growing now, or look for water — what is it you say—

— Drill. Drill for water, you mean?—

— Yes, make a well. And grow.—

— Grow rice?—

— Rice, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, many things. They’re saying it can be, if they have the money.—

— You can get permission to drill a well?—

— If they had the money they can do it, even right now. They will if they had money. Just the money! — Maryam laughed, at them and herself — always it was just the money, for everything you wanted and couldn’t have.

— And they’d know how to go about cultivation — growing the rice?—

— They know, Julie, yes, oh from years — learned from Mr Aboulkanim, of course they know … only the money …—

On this journey now she was in dialogue with herself.

What’s the legal position with funds in a Trust — why hadn’t she taken more interest in learning these things about money! All very well to scorn them, turn up your nose at the bad smell, when there’s nothing you really want that you could buy with it; the second-hand car he found was fine. She had always known about that Trust — the family lawyer had told her father it was right and proper that she, the beneficiary, be informed. So she’d once signed some papers thrust in front of her. The Trust had been set up, apparently, to avoid death duties when Nigel Ackroyd Summers died and his daughter would inherit a considerable fortune from him (even if he were to leave most of his wealth to his second wife). Tax reasons — to benefit the heir, of course, lucky girl. Always tax reasons for what Nigel Ackroyd Summers does. Perhaps — there must be — some way of drawing on that money? Nearly thirty years old, living in some god-forsaken country, isn’t that a case of dire need, for a rich man’s only daughter, without waiting for anyone’s death? She remembered — summoned — a term, maybe one the lawyer had used? — pre-inheritance. If she had heard it from the lawyer, that must mean it came up theoretically, but as a possibility. So it could be done. Why not? You must write to someone— the lawyer, of course. No, to Archie. Yes, always it’s to Archie. Ask Archie to look into the principle, the possibility, with a lawyer — not my father’s, that one would be alerted to objections on behalf of his client, knowing the daughter’s reputation in the family…

She returned herself to awareness of the company in the car only once, asking Maryam to ask the men what sort of money a piece of an oasis where things were growing might cost? How much? There was some animated cross-talk of disagreement and agreement between the men, and then came a sum pronounced, impressively drawn-out as if the flourishes of written Arabic were being rolled forth on the air.

Maryam translated. But she had understood, and she had become used to rapid mental conversion from their currency into the hard currencies that mattered to the world: in those currencies, which the Trust certainly held, rely on Nigel Ackroyd Summers for that, the sum was extremely — unbelievably— modest, confirming the feasibility: the possibility. Probably a derisive sum in terms of what the Trust was worth (the lawyer had carefully concealed from her what that might be). About the dollar, sterling or deutschmark price of a new car on the luxury level Danielle would be provided with by her husband. — Stop sneering at the rich, you’re thinking of making use of the fact of being one, yourself, aren’t you! Abdu (still names him, to herself, by the one he had when she discovered him in the garage) was right, back there, when he reproached me for repudiating their value, the makers and shakers.

Dreamed green.

I dreamt it because it exists.

There is another way, not surrogate succession to the Uncle Yaqub’s vehicle workshop, not the dirty work waiting in some other, the next country — here, a possibility. A possibility: his favourite dream-word: ‘there are possibilities’ in whatever country will let him pass through its barriers of immigration.

Here. You could have it both. The mute desert and the life-chorus of green.

When they arrived back at his parents’ house he had already eaten with his mother. The mother enquired, through him, how his wife had enjoyed the trip.

I could never have imagined … Rice is so beautiful … wheat, maize — nothing to compare as a crop … growing …

Well we have left some for you to eat. He spoke, amusedly tolerant, in Arabic. His mother smiled royally at her, and lifted a permissive hand to the kitchen. Maryam had sped ahead to prepare a meal for her father, silvery husks falling from the soles of her worn sandals. Mother and son saw his wife pick up a few and examine them, lying in her palm.

In the privacy of the lean-to she was able to give him the kiss of her enthusiasm.

So you had a good time. Hot, ay. He tasted the salt of sweat on her lips.

Have you ever been there?

I’ve been there. I know Aboulkanim.

It seems a successful business … and producing food …

Maybe.

You know I understand now that you have to live with the desert to know what water is.

I told you before you came. Dry, nothing. In this place.

No, no … that’s not what I’m trying to … Water’s — water is change; and the desert doesn’t. So when you see the two together, the water field of rice growing, and it’s in the desert — there’s a span of life right there — like ours — and there’s an existence beyond any span. You know?

You are not believing. You always tell me. Not a Christian, since you left your school, not a Muslim like my family, so what is this now?

He felt he was listening to one of those arguments about the meaning of life started by the rambling of the old man with white hair tied in a ribbon at that table in the Café he thought of as the home she had left behind to be with him in this annex to his family.

Not heaven, nirvana — this place where we are, what there is here. A kind of proof. Do you get me — I can’t explain.

With the thumbnail of one hand he was taking the rind of garage dirt from under the nails of the other; his fastidiousness, more than anything he said, expressed to her, bringing an empathy of injury, the frustration and humiliation of his return to nothing more than the underbelly of the Uncle Yaqub’s vehicles. She lay down beside him and stroked the hand, a moment.

I’m told you can buy part of the oasis already under cultivation. I suppose from a landowner. Or is it from the government? And you can get permission to drill for a well, in the desert. Did you know?

With money you can buy anything from the government. The landowners who call themselves a government. Same thing. That is what is here, in this place of my people. That is one of the first things for you to understand — what’s true, about life in this place. There is no mystery about our life. Money — and the government will tell you the deal is done, Al-Hamdu lillah.

He was speaking in Arabic.

The price is so reasonable — I asked your father and that friend of his who came with us. I could hardly believe it. Something I could almost certainly raise — from back there, there’s a Trust meant for, well, when my father dies, but there are ways …

You want to buy a rice concession! You! What for?

She did not look at him but at the unpainted board ceiling, aware of his attention on her profile.

For us.

He lifted his spine and let his body thud back to the bed with a grunt like a laugh. Julie, we do not live here.

Making our own living doing something — interesting? Useful, different, growing food. Something neither of us has ever done.

Once it was an agency for actors in Cape Town, now rice in an oasis, another adventure to hear from her, from her rich girl’s ignorance, innocence.

For her part, she sensed it best to place before him something of hard-headed calculation.

That Mr Aboulkanim obviously makes money.

Not rice money.

He spoke now in fluent mix of English and Arabic, translating himself, leaping from phrase to phrase.

That is his — what do you say — his front, the beautiful rice fields. He makes money all right — plenty of it — and do you know how? Do you? He is a smuggler, he calls it import-export, he’s a go-between in arms sales for a crowd of cronies over the border, and that’s only what I can tell you about Mr Aboulkanim, there’s much more of the same I don’t know, that people who know admire him for because he’s successful. That’s success, here.

She sat up startled and confronted him. Your father works for him.

My father works for what makes him respectable. Your rice field. My father isn’t let into the Big Business, my father is the poor devil, may I be forgiven to speak like that, who fills in the right papers to sell rice, only rice, and gets a cash handout every few months. So he uses my father’s honest name.

And now she confronted herself. Why should I be so shocked at this story; how many lunch guests at Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sundays are involved in deals that are not revealed, and if known are not talked about along with the price of Futures — not arms deals; but why not? Perhaps even those, passing by remote control through the sale of diamonds in Angola.

If we had a concession it wouldn’t have anything to do with all that. Mr Aboulkanim. Just growing rice.

He rolled away from her, rose, and changed his shirt, took from the canvas bag his folder of papers.

I’ve got a meeting tonight with someone. We’ll see if he turns up.

He came to where she sat flushed with the heat of the day, dangling her legs from the iron bar of the bed, shook his head over her, giving her the smile, that treasure so often withheld.

She had not shown him the photograph, the slippery husks of rice sifting through her fingers. Until it faded it would be proof that the place exists; could have been attained.