The Pickup

Chapter 44

The passion of dispute that erupts like this abandons intimacy that has been respected; through the makeshift door of the lean-to it flowed to the family living-room, through the whole house, invading, overtaking the preoccupations and concerns of all who lived so closely there; as if each, even the children, looked up from these, through the day, as at a sudden sound or sight. What happens between man and wife, that’s their business, it is customary to maintain the principle of privacy even to the extent of appearing to be unaware that anything is happening. In a house crowded with relatives this is particularly stringent; not only the door of the lean-to is too thin. The surface conventions of blood ties and religious observance are able to contain subsumed almost without a ripple, for example, the presence of Khadija and its implications. But whatever is happening in the lean-to is different, it thrusts itself in demand upon the house. As son, brother, cousin he has no option, no other resource but to come out and repeat to each relative the same account of what has happened in that lean-to — from where she, the foreign wife he brought to them, does not appear, either because she accepts that he speak for her, or because he does not allow her to speak for herself. Who can say. But even when her favourite, the small Leila, is seen by him making for the lean-to door, he sends the child away.

Everyone is confronted with this account, even those who are only embarrassed and bewildered by a situation they cannot understand, they shouldn’t be admitted to. Something that belongs to the life of this family member so different from theirs, lived unimaginably in worlds they do not know. As if he could expect some explanation, support, from them in their innocence, the ignorance he has always made them aware they live in. His brothers Ahmad and Daood listen to him in disbelief, a woman does what her husband says. They are too loyal to him, too respectful, to reveal what this makes him immediately alert to again: the stigma on his manhood. The women — she’d now joined them, the kitchen was the neutral ground from which to take the right of entry by way of household tasks, playing with their children, exchanging pidgin-language — when he approached the women their embarrassment emanated from them like sweat. It was from their gathering under the awning they spoke at all. She is a very good person. It will be all right. She will do what is right, she is a wife. Sometimes we just get upset, you know, for a while, then it passes, ma sha allah.

His insistence drove them into silence. — There is no time for a mood to pass. Two days. That’s it. I want to know, has she talked to you. This business. Staying here. In this place. Have you said anything like that to her? Have you? I need an answer. Has she been talking like this?—

Amina looked round over the bundle of her baby at the others and shook her head conclusively, earrings swinging, in mandate of denial.

He had the thought of getting one of the women to speak to her; but he now felt no one of them really was to be trusted. Never mind teaching a few words of English, she had influenced them with her rich girl’s Café ideas of female independence.

In his father’s face, the slow lowering and raising of thick eyelids and the twitching parentheses at either corner of the mouth, he saw that the response was silent reproach, brought up, deserved, for being too proud and foolish to have taken the chance offered him, Al-Hamdu lillah, by his Uncle Yaqub to stay where he, a son, belongs.

Again the laconic response: a wife follows what her husband wishes.

This from a father who the son knew did what his wife in her wisdom and character, yes, Al-Hamdu lillah, knew was right.

Facing himself this way and that, where to turn— Maryam. Maryam, alone. With the other women, she had said nothing. Maryam: of course, who was the first to see blazoned on his face as she left the house for her work as a servant, I’m not going. Maryam made herself the friend, acolyte, it is his little sister Maryam who had the idea of the occupations, the English teaching, Maryam who made his wife at home in this place, well, all right, gave her something to do in the meantime, waiting with a poor devil all those months applying for visas. Whom else to turn to. Like a blood-letting, confront her.

Summoned on her return from work for charges against her, and she knows it at once, it slows her feet as she comes into the house from the place beneath the awning where the child Leila has been sent to fetch her. Alone; he’ll see her alone, without the twittering support of the women.

— What does she say to you. I want to know. What do you tell her, you are the one, you tell her what to do here, you make her your sister here, afraid to be without you, the ladies that offer tea and learn English, the schoolteachers who flatter her. I want to know. What have you done. Who told you to do this. Did you ask me, your brother? Come, I want to hear from you what you have been saying to her.—

He has a power over this girl he will never have over his wife Julie, and that he would never want to have, it is part of what he emigrates from, every time he gets away. While he exerts it, it sickens him, the anger his sister fearfully sees rising in him. — Come. Speak, speak. What have you done. — She has been weeping through his tirade.

He cannot make out what she’s saying now. — What? Speak!—

The girl is an idiot. What else can you expect. Never getting out of this place, accustomed to being spoken to as I am speaking to her, by brothers like me.

Where else to turn to.

He cannot evade any longer. Her presence has been following him about the house from confrontation to confrontation, hearing him, aware of his frustration, his failure to extract from anybody any answers real to him; her authoritative version of his face is before him all the time. If she is at prayer — she is the only one from whom he will hold back, the others have been burst upon. He will wait. Everyone keeps out of the family living-room. Away from him. Even the children are hastily snatched when they linger at the leading doors. He sits in one of the upright chairs second-hand from Uncle Yaqub when his house was redecorated. Facing her empty throne. Biding his time. There is no cyclone of emotion of which she does not occupy the still eye of his respect. Nothing, ever, can take precedence over that.

He does not have to wait long. She comes into the room as if it is at her summoning that he is there, and occupies her sofa. He gets up to greet her and takes a chair nearer her she indicates with a half-tilt of a hand from her lap.

She knows what has happened. Or rather what threatens to happen — it’s seeped through the house in whispers and in the supersonic of thoughts. She must have had related to her many versions. But he tells her all, over again all comes from his own mouth as only he can know it. She asks questions, gives no opinions.

This girl did not have a family at home in her country.

Well, of course she has, but she does not get on well with them — her father.

Her mother is dead, inna lillah, may the Lord have mercy on her daughter.

Her mother remarried and she’s well-off — she lives in America and will welcome her.

She found our life here strange to her.

Well, yes, of course she must have but you know she has made the effort — to fit in — just for while we had to be here.

This time, is there suitable work for your ambitions already arranged for you in that country.

Not yet — wonderful opportunities there that have not been where I’ve been away before! — other times, those other countries.

She wished to have a child.

Yes and I would wish it, but not until I know we are settled, my work, and a home where we are going to spend our lives.

She gets up, weighty in her robe. Her left foot falters for balance.

She’s getting old; this is what you return to, abandon, each time.

Mother—

But she, who always has advice and a solution, for everyone, whether this is welcome or not, has none for him. My son — she gives him her blessing— Allah yahfazak, and she leaves the room, he knows, for her place of prayer.

Mother?

Ah, an ally, that’s it; but not his. An ally of the foreigner— she will be the one to restore the son to the mother, lure him, bring him home at last.