The Pickup Part 11

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 s.h.i.+ning 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 appli-ance could be used only when the others were disconnected, and there were hours when the village electricity failed: cold The Pickup water, darkness. The paraffin burners were the resort of the household; n.o.body 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.

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 pa.s.s; 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 Cafe 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing 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; detach-ment 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 gra.s.sland it was how many thousand years ago?

The Pickup 180.

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 h.e.l.l of my place. She'll go back there. The big trees round her cottage. The gra.s.s a black man came to cut. Her kind; that Cafe. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sport 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 wh.o.r.e he'd picked up in his loneliness; if he brought his mother, who deserved everything, an obviously high-cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. Suddenly, that was the dream, it had happened: gone.

Out to buy fritters.

Canada had enough Arabs, Pakistanis and Indians*the kind other than the red ones who were the original Permanent Residents. Sweden, small country a generous refuge to the politically persecuted, was more cautious about those whose plea did not have the same kind of justification.

He began to feel that his manhood was in question. She was his wife, after all, he had to satisfy her needs not only in bed.

Green. He now was demanding a country for her as well as for himself. And he could not admit defeat by discussing this with her. When he was not in the clangour of whirring, grind-ing, and the stink of fuel helping out at the vehicle repair shop, he was about among a certain group of young men to whom he had gravitated once the ones-in-the-know, who a.s.sured that with palm-grease they could get you in wherever you wanted, proved to be living on hopes that couldn't be realized*even for themselves! Else why would they still choose to be here, selling watermelons in the market, mending shoes, slaughtering sheep and making coffee, like two of his brothers.

These other young men have some education*like himself*one has a university degree but is a second-grade clerk in a local government office: he has tried to get out but as he has been refused a pa.s.sport at this end of the process because there is a record of his having been a political troublemaker, as a student, dissident against the regime, he hasn't the first requirement of the many for visa application. For reasons of the same record there's no hope of him being promoted in the civil service; others in the group that drifts every night to the oil lamps of one of the bars disguised as coffee shops have similar histories. Three*like himself*have been declared illegal and deported, back to this place, from the countries they managed to enter and work at whatever they could turn a hand to. They talk until late in order not to go home to the family warrens they escaped once, and to which they have been returned like dead letters*illegals have no fixed address, no ident.i.ty. They talk about what it is unwise to talk about, even in this poor hole where the Uncle and the husband of Maryam's employer, neither the ruling party's local mayor nor the Imam, would ever be around to overhear, although you could never be sure that a security policeman in plain-clothes gal.a.b.i.ah might not be among the shadows.

These young men want change, not the rewards of Heaven.

Change in the forms it already had taken for others in the old century, change for what it was becoming in this new one. To catch up! With elections that are not rigged or declared void when the government's opposition wins; hard bargains with the West made from a position of counter-power, not foot-kissing, a.r.s.e-licking servitude (they bring the right vocabulary back with them from the West, whatever else they were denied); change with a voice over the Internet not from the minaret, a voice making demands to be heard by the financial G.o.ds of the world.

... bring the modern world to Islam but we're not going to allow ourselves to be taken over by it, no, forced to*

... revolutionary but not like other revolutions, they must understand this is a moral religious revolution*

*but it can only be achieved by the seizure of state power, like any other revolution! What are you*

*Yes yes! No question! Don't think there's any other way to get rid of this government that grows fat on us and tells us this poverty is freedom, bismillah*

... we can't go on accepting what our grandfathers do, what life is that, Ibrahim*the traditional interpreters of Islam ... for them Islam hasn't anything to do with the future, everything is complete, forever, you only have to ...

... total Islamization*against world powers?*what a mad dream; no, no*

*we must cross-fertilize Islam with the world if the ideals of Islam are to survive, the old model doesn't fit, any kind of isolation can't stand a chance with what's happening in the world, ask Ibrahim, technological revolution already here while we're just talking, talking ... !

And as young men do when they drink together they also spoke of women, but not in the way the men in the garage near the EL-AY Cafe did.

*Look, we don't want to deny our past for the American s.e.x we enjoy seeing on TV (there was a whistle and laughter) ... but hijab, I mean you happen to make love with a married woman, she wants it, ay*and she must be stoned to death, who can accept that it's the law, even if it isn't carried out*who can accept that in this age!*

The university graduate emptied his gla.s.s and offered: *

I just read it somewhere. 'A Muslim doesn't fall in love with a woman, but only with Allah.'* He kept a gloomy face, perhaps himself a lover in difficulties, while there was more laughter*the others evidently did not regard the cynicism as blasphemous.

*So what's our life? With women? What? You tell me.

What freedom do they have or we have with them?*

*But they're the ones now with their own revolution*

*Oh it's part of ours*

*But they want to decide for themselves. They don't want anyone to tell them to wear the chador, all right, but if they do want to wear it, they won't have some Westerner telling them to throw it away. They want to study or work anywhere they decide outside the kitchen, the modern world where men still think we're the only ones to have a place.*

*We must get one of them to speak, you know, next time we have a meeting*never done that, we are true sons of our grandfathers*

*Will they dare to come*

*They'll come. They'll come. I know a few ...

*Ah then you'll realty see how the government fathers get the police to go after us ...

The graduate of the university where he himself gained the degree that had qualified him to be employed as, in another country, what her friends called a grease-monkey turned to him where he was listening, silent.

*I'll lend you a book. Ever heard of Shahrur Muhammad Shahrur? Written a book, al-Kitab wa-l-Qur'an: Qira'a mu'asira. He says people believed once that the sun revolved round the earth, but it was then discovered that the opposite was true, eh? Muslims still believe prejudices of religious authority that are the complete opposite of the correct per-spective*conventional religious authority can't exist with economic market forces today! But take care. Don't leave the book lying around. You can't find it, here, somebody sent it, and even then it had to be hidden in the cover of some other book, some nonsense. A package of anything printed that comes from overseas, it's opened by the authorities, perhaps you've forgotten that, my brother.*

He was their brother in frustration. Sometimes he felt himself fired by them to act, join them to plot and agitate, risk, for change here*this desert. But within him something drew back appalled at the submission; the future of this place the world tried to confine him to was not his place in that world. Permanent residence; under no matter what government, religious law, secular law, what president in a keffiyeh or got up in military kit with braid and medals*that was not for him. The company of brothers in frustration salved his own, but this secret refusal, his refusal, roused in him strongly as any s.e.xual desire.

Friday is the day for visits and family affairs.

The shops are closed for noon prayers at the mosque, so is the vehicle workshop. During the day it was not unusual for the Uncle's silver-blue BMW with ta.s.selled blinds to draw up in the street before the gate. Tea was quickly made, sweetmeats taken from their biscuit tin, c.o.ke from the refrigerator (which like the car for his nephew also had been his gift to the family) because the Uncle's preferences are well-known.

He always brings gifts for the children of the house, particularly for those of the son of the house who has not been heard from, disappeared to the oil fields, and he greets everyone with the enthusiasm of a mayor meeting his const.i.tuents, and then retires with the mother, his sister. They are left in private, either under the awning or in the parents' room, where a special, comfortable chair for the Uncle is carried in by young Muhammad. It is understood that serious family matters are discussed. The father seldom takes part but this is not regarded by him, or anyone else, as demeaning of what would be his authority. No-one questions the position of Ibrahim's mother.

On this Friday afternoon the brother and sister had emerged from their privacy and were in the company of the rest of the family, taking tea and refreshments. Only Ibrahim and his wife were not there; summoned by the mother, Maryam was sent to call them, rapping softly with the knuckle of her third finger on the clapboard door. They had heard the talk and laughter, orchestrated by the unmistakable lead of the Uncle's voice*impossible not to, through the thin door*but Ibrahim was on the iron bed reading newspapers; Julie, amusing small Leila, who liked to spend time in the lean-to decking herself out in the few Ndebele and Zulu bead necklaces that had somehow been tossed into the elegant suitcase, had sent the child out to join the Friday gathering. Leila, your mummy wants you. The child caught the gist of English-Arabic pidgin, laughing, and obeyed, first resting her plump cheek a moment, smooth against the back of Julie's hand.

After the knock on the door, Julie stretched, peered over the newspaper, opened her eyes wide and pulled her mouth down in a closed smile: come. A finger placed somewhere on a column answered that lie would finish what he was reading.

She brushed her hair for the company.

She took his hand as they entered, whether in support of him, comforting his reluctance to spend any part of his hours to himself with the voice that reverberated through the workshop, or to support herself in her claim to be one of the family. There were warm greetings; only Khadija seemed not to see them; whenever the Uncle appeared she sat transfixed, like that, on him, her children drawn around under her arms, watching his lips for word that he was going to do something for her*something to find and bring back her husband and the father of these children. Others could only look away from the sister-in-law, not to shame her in the spectacle of her demanding humiliation. Anyone could see she was expecting an announcement of some kind, believing her situation, the well-horn woman deserted by a son of the family for a woman at the oil fields only after his money must have been the matter deliberated between his Uncle and mother.

But apparently, unusually, whatever the private talk was about, the father had been present; been required? The three sat ranged together.

Ibrahim's mother's breast, prow of the family, rose and fell deeply; his wife saw it, ominous. At a signal to Maryam, the handing round of tea stopped and talk broke off, the gaiety of children was reduced to whispering.

The mother called her son and his wife over to her where room had been made for them to sit. She drew herself up and leaned forward, took another of her deep slow breaths that customarily ended in a sigh (she would rise from prayer with a breath like that) but now gave weight of importance to what she was about to say. It was an announcement, yes, but not for the one who awaited something.

The mother looked slowly at her son and his wife, singling them out as if her hands were laid upon them, and spoke in the language of which his wife, suddenly inexplicably tense, forgot all she had learnt and could make out only the name of the Uncle*Uncle Yaqub, Uncle Yaqub, repeated, and the familiar invocation, Al-Hamdu lillah. When the mother had done, the son, lover, husband stood; at bay. That was what she, who had found him, followed him restored to his family, saw he was. With a lifting of spread-fingered hand to his forehead, and the drop of the hand to his side, a strange kind of obeisance, it seemed he took permission to himself to turn to her and translate in a low even voice from his mother tongue.

He thinks about, he thinks to make me his workshop manager.

The father summoned his own small store of English and understood what had been left out. *Your Uncle Yaqub, he can take you into his business ...*

Everybody*poor Khadija is n.o.body*was animated in congratulatory exclamations, murmurs, a happy confusion of interruption with admiration for the Uncle's generosity and the transformation he has the power to bring close to their lives.

It was hardly necessary for Ibrahim to respond: the family was doing it for him. Wonderful. Uncle Yaqub! In business with Uncle Yaqub! But his mother was gazing at him with proudly raised head. At once the message flashed: she had done it for him.

Julie was surrounded by the excited talk, unable to follow much, hearing approximations she could invent from the joyous cadence, what an opportunity, how lucky, how good, how generous an Uncle. And one of the brothers, Ahmad the slaughterer whose only opportunity was to have blood on his hands, jumped up with another kind of generosity and spoke for the brothers, a voice raised out of normal pitch by emotion. Ibrahim heard in their language: *We are full of joy for you, you deserve this. It's great, my brother, for us to have you back with us as we were when we were kids! It has never been right, without you. Allah be praised. May you and your wife be blessed with happiness and prosperity. And now that this has happened, please*let our parents and your brothers and sisters see you married in our law, let us have a real wedding, we were not invited to the wedding before you came home.*

Laughter from everyone at this last. Maryam quickly translated breathily in her friend's ear, and the two young women laughed and nodded, together.

His mother, perhaps alone of the gathering, was waiting for him to have the chance to speak for himself what everyone knew lie must be feeling, what he wished to say to his Uncle, who had singled him out among her sons, the blessed one, the success.

Ibrahim was vaguely lifting and lowering his outspread hands*to quiet the affectionate voices answering for him, or to take in those hands*a lovely gesture, some interpreted*

the opportunity offered him. In all the attention that pinned him down he felt that of his wife and he turned a moment to her and gave her a version*strange, final, it's awful beauty*

a culminating version of that smile she always awaited from him. He addressed his Uncle in the full formality of their tongue, as if there were no-one else present: He did not know what to say. It was an offer he would never have thought of, never have expected. Never. He knows how much the business his Uncle has created means to him. He thanked him, with the greatest respect, for his generosity, on behalf of his mother and father, brothers and sisters, for what he had done now, this day. He asked, with the greatest respect to have ...

a little time ... to realize ...

He did not turn to her. He sought the eves of his mother; now she was the only one present.

And they all understood: overcome! They clapped and pa.s.sed him from one to the other, men and women, in their embraces.

She kept somewhat in the background, although she.

too, was embraced. She had had from him that smile that couldn't be explained.

Something else was not explained: out of delicacy of feeling, among the family present, although all were aware of it. The Uncle has decided to take Ibrahim in; workshop manager? This means heir apparent. Of the vehicle repair workshop that has valuable contracts for maintenance of provincial government vehicles, the mayors fleet, whatever other notables this poor district has, and a franchise for sales of parts, a dealers.h.i.+p in sales of both second-hand and new models of the best German and American cars. There is no son of the Uncle's own begetting, alive, alas, and the sonin-law and prospective son-in-law of the educated daughters are not interested in learning the business by dirtying their hands*they want to have government positions, sitting on their backsides in air-conditioned offices in the capital. So when Uncle Yaqub retires*long may he be granted life in good health*and dies, Ibrahim will inherit the business, and live in a house with fine carpets and furniture in the style of gilt and velvet French kings used to have, with a maid to clean it all, as the house of the notable employs Maryam to do. That is Ibrahim's blessed future. Al-Hamdu lillah. Praise be to G.o.d.

Ibrahim has declined the offer to take charge of his Uncle's workshop. The chance of a lifetime.

Are you crazy?

She had said to him, It might still be months before we get visas, at least you'd have something a bit more ... I don't know, responsible, in the meantime.

Meantime.

Permanent residence. That's what it means.