The Pickup (28 page)

No right, hers, to say now what was eloquently unsaid ever since—certainly the first nights in the doll's house—
I love you.

Listen to me. Where did you get the idea. I'm not going back there. I don't belong there.

She has taken his head between her hard palms and forced his face before her, she feels his texture, the nap of a day's growth of beard against her skin. She has the image of him, one of those habitual and dear, pressing his tongue against the inner side of his cheek to tauten the flesh as he delicately shaves round his moustache; the image stored.

You know that. Saying both at once: the unsaid (that stored image is love) and what has been said, I'm not going back.

What are you talking? What is it. You are not going to America. That's what you say. You are not going to your home. That is what you say.

And now she has to tell him what she thought he must have understood. I'm staying here.

T
he 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.

T
here is a terrible strength that comes to a dread decision aghastly opposed by other people: their words, supplication, silent condemnation, are hammer blows driving that decision deeper and deeper into its certainty.

Maryam's clinging affection and unexpressed joy at the idea that her unique friend, from another world and closer in understanding than any sister, would stay in her husband's home, like other women, was the only support; his mother— no indication, no word or sign transmitted from her, her usual stately presence supervised calmly in the kitchen where the girl, Ibrahim's wife, continued to do what was assigned to her, just as if the mother were not aware that she was supposed to be emigrating with the son in twenty-four hours. And the girl slices onions as if she cannot be aware of this either.

Twenty-four hours. The decision that has been growing in her, changing her as the cells in the body renew themselves spontaneously, becomes a clench of panic: it's happening too quickly, too soon, the time has come before she's really ready—

Funk.

Way back, The Table has the word.

But it's all been thought out, felt through, dismissed, rejected as crazy (yes, he's not alone in making that accusation; become self-accusation), renewed, taking over—final—many times in the months: the meantime, as he called it.

He would not allow himself or her to lie down on their bed, to submit even to exhaustion that night. If he could plead, reason, argue, bargain, reproach, rage long enough the time that was left would sweep her in this flash flood to the airport, onto the plane that would carry her away with him just as she had carried herself with him, deported to this place.

Listen … we'll make a good life there. You want me to do something I want, the kind of position … use my brain, study—you always tell me that. You are the one who knows I can do it. You'll be happy. You're happy with me—I make you happy—yes, and you, how can I be without you. A couple of weeks, while you're in California, I don't have to worry if you've got everything you need—all right, but we have some money, I can even come there to see you. I will. You've followed all this way with me, I'm so lucky, I know, so how can it be—

So why? Why? Why did you come? Why—you bought that ticket for yourself? You hung on to me? What for? Don't say it! Just don't say it.
Not now.

His conviction that ‘love' is a luxury not for him has found its proof. Yes.

Won't have her say it; she sees. Say something else that has the same meaning.

Ibrahim, you'd think I was leaving you, the way you take it. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going back there, I've told you, told you. I'm in your home.

You are a liar. Why did you never say one word to me? You were lying to me all the time. Here in this bed with me kissing and lying. Fucking and lying.

I never lie to you.

Ah no? You only lie with the mouth? Keep quiet when there is what you must say, that's not lying?

I thought, I really thought you saw how I was beginning—you make it so hard to explain—to live here. Oh my god. How I was different—not the same as I was back there when you met me. I thought we were close enough for you to understand, even if it was something you—didn't expect …

Not lying when you got the money from your uncle for the tickets? Not lying when you signed the papers for the visa, not lying when you went smiling to the embassy to show them your face, my wife ‘accompanying me', you saw it written on my visa? No? That was not lying? Or was that true then, and now—I don't know, out of the sky something somebody has changed your mind, driven you crazy? Where did you get the idea from, how, where?

And while his anguish batters them both she now knows where. The desert.

But she cannot tell him that. The stump of wall in the sands where the street ends. The dog waits and a child places a hand.

She cannot tell him that.

He shuns the desert. It is the denial of everything he yearns for, for him. And if he should remember—the enthusiasms of some members of The Table—his next derision could be that her decision was a typical piece of sheltered middle-class Western romanticism. Like picking up a grease-monkey.

Confusion is singing in his ears. But what is the confusion? No confusion; I should know that. Like me, like me, she won't go back where she belongs. Other people tell her she belongs. She looks for somewhere else.
I'm staying here.
Here!

The elegant suitcase is standing packed. Finally he can't stop staring at it. He lunges to it and struggles with the digital
lock, the combination comes to him and he gets it open and begins to throw out all her things; on the bed, on the floor. Now she will do it. Put them back, give in.