The Pickup (24 page)

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.

F
rom the canvas bag standing ready, that carried his life from country to country, he had taken the letters sent by the woman in California.

He said nothing to her; she had been completely dismissive of her mother's likelihood of knowing anyone whose signature could be of use, anywhere, in a situation remote as his. But more than that: his hopes had been raised so often—the thought of this brought that confusion of resentment and shame that was new to him, a result of coming back to this place. He could not face her philosophical encouragement, real or assumed, her patience, real, or a cover for the adventure soon to become another to entertain back round The Table; the beautiful suitcase she didn't value stood there, ready for her.

No more news. He would say nothing to her, nothing at all, of the progress he was making, this time, this one time, and she knew so little about the delicacy of such business, she was too ignorant to be able to read the signs. Taking her to a consulate or embassy for personal questioning indicated nothing to her. Better that way. When—if—no!—
when,
this time, he would have something to say to her, it would be: news.

And there was something else. There was an aspect to the triumph of his refusal to grasp at the opportunity offered by an Uncle Yaqub other young men stagnating in the village would give anything (of their nothing, poor devils like himself) to have, an aspect he had hardly known himself when the great decision—the best moment of his manhood so far— had been made by him: say no. Even if this girl had failed in the purpose he must not forget (in any tangle of emotion about her) he had counted on her as a source of Permanent Residence in her country, she had somehow in the meantime they happened to be living through brought about in him also an interim of meantime brooding contemplation, moving into thoughts of a kind he had never had before. When he had said, from the very depths of himself: no; it was also no to abandoning the man she had fallen in love with (as they say); no to what would have determined for sure that the adventure would be over, it could not become that of the wife of a future Uncle Yaqub. He would have been left in this place and married off and fathered more sons who could not get out.

He came from the capital that day and as he parked Uncle Yaqub's old car at the gate saw women coming along the street. She—Julie—with Amina and infant, Maryam and the little girl and—he had to look again—Khadija, they were coming from the market, female pack-horses loaded with plastic carriers from which green stalks and leaves overflowed. Onions or potatoes burst out of one, and gathering them was a game between Julie, the child and Khadija—apparently
madam
who kept to her own purdah of superiority now would venture out with the other women if Julie were one of them.

He waited in the car. What kind of life. For her. It presented itself in its shame, approaching him. The child pointed him out, broke away from the women and rushed up to
demonstrate his presence as if his arrival were some special occasion.

It was.

He greeted and exchanged a few words with his mother where she sat on her sofa in the communal room while Julie and the other women chattered over unpacking the market shopping in the all-purpose kitchen. She waved as she passed through to the lean-to; she would not disturb him and his mother.

He came to her. She was dowsing face, hair and hands in the basin of cool water she kept supplied for them, placed on the chair she was kneeling before.

So hot! She turned and looked up, a streaming smile, as if with tears.

He opened his hand. Between finger and thumb were stamped papers round two passports.

What?

She stood up, wildly shaking wet hands. What?

Visas. Entry permits. The United States of America.

All in one movement he threw the documents onto the bed, overpowered her in a crushing embrace, a yell of triumph that brought their mouths together through water trickling from her hair.

I
am going to America.

Told them, hadn't he.

So it should not have amazed them that he now had the authority stamped in his passport and his wife's. There were family embraces of congratulation implicitly apologizing for having doubted if not disbelieved him. Only Khadija referred to that—You were just boasting then, weren't you.— He did not take the jibe kindly; Julie saw this in his face but did not understand what had been said.

Others in the family could not rejoice. Maryam cried: Julie would miss her wedding. He embraced his father; his mother. For forgiveness, for their blessing, once again. When he came home with his foreign wife his mother had allowed tears to mark the cast of face she had bequeathed to him, now she allowed no emotion to change the sculpture of years and the discipline of prayer. Or perhaps features and flesh could not express what she experienced in this departure; yet again. Only she, and her son, could know what that was. He said to her under the voices of others, I will send for you. To come; to visit us. It was as well, he knew, that she seemed not to hear.

T
he visas in his hand.

Still a number of practical details to attend to. He must go back to the capital, present his passport to his own government's authorities, fill in forms pertaining to his emigration. He must return to collect the passport when behind the files and the computer screens whatever the process was has been completed. The airline would not accept a booking until both passports and visas were brought for scrutiny; and of course once this had been done, tickets could not be issued without money to pay for them.

They sat on the iron bed in the lean-to reviewing their resources. She had a few dollar traveller's cheques left but these would have to be kept aside to provide for immediate needs on arrival. His final hand-out pay from his Uncle, if they managed to leave, as he was determined to, within not more than two weeks, must go to Maryam as a wedding gift; her brother could not do less.

Your father.

She stared in alarm.

Just say the word.

No. No, no.

Your father. He can pay for the tickets there and have them sent to you. That is the way. We will pay back.

I can't.

Again.

He had to fix her with his mother's eyes while he kept control of himself, kept his voice soft and reasoning, held down, as he had had to do countless times in immigration offices, his frustration, and swallow the reflux of evidence that privilege can never be brought to understanding of reality, of what matters, the dignity of survival against principles.

How to make him understand: her voice sharpened.

You wouldn't ask your Uncle Yaqub, would you!

I asked. He said he would not help me to run away again. He enjoyed himself.

She put her head on his shoulder and buried her face in his neck. And he had not told her of this, the latest refusal. He had spared her.

Back where she came from she had been the one in charge, the one with status; here, in what was his home, his place, ineradicable birthmark that defined in him that place's ways of going about things, he had done—and only he could do—what was necessary. Alone with her in the lean-to now, he talked more than he had ever talked, taking her step by step out of her ignorance. The brother-in-law of a cousin had been in the United States successfully (that means legally) for six years. The family had lost touch with the man but through the months of asking everyone who might have heard where he was, in the days of sitting it out in coffee stalls, nights in the backroom bars in the streets where she had seen the bloated body of a dead sheep, he had been slowly gathering the information he was after. He had been able to get in touch with this cousin's brother-in-law. And this
one, somehow,
Al-Hamdu lillah
(the usage of home came unnoticed to his tongue as The Table would exclaim ‘Thank Christ' when some secular dispensation could be acknowledged only through a deity), had done everything he could, and more, to offer a start for them at the other end—America. America. He was janitor in a large apartment block— she'd been to the States, she'd know how they are twenty, forty storeys, plenty of people living there—as janitor or caretaker or whatever he was called, he had a place to live, an apartment down at the bottom—

Yes, she had been there, to America, she had seen how some people lived in the apartment buildings of the affluent.

—In the basement.

The cousin's brother-in-law knew a lot of people who had found work to get started with, and knew how from that base you could move up towards the kind of position you wanted, so long as you had education where you came from and could learn to speak the language well, learn the skills. Night college courses, schools of technology, advanced computer training, computer science—that's it! This man had all the information, addresses of institutions, foundations, openings, opportunities. Chances.