Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

Clustered predators round a kill. Its a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. One of the unemployed black men who beg by waving vehicles into parking bays sidles his way deftly through fenders, signals with his head Oka-ay, Oka-ay go inside, go! and mimes control of the steering wheel. Another like him appears, and they push her and her car into a loading bay. The street hustles on. They stand, looking musingly beyond her while she fumbles for her purse. An experts quick glance at what she has put in his hand assures the street boss that it is more than adequate. She doesnt know how to thank them enough, etc. He hitches his body to get the money stowed in trousers cut to fit somebody else and smiles with his attention on the lookout for the next vehicle seeking a place to park. A woman wearing a towel as a shawl, enthroned on a fruit-box before her stock of hair combs, razor blades, pumice stones, woollen caps and headache powders, yells out to him what must be a teasing remark in a language the young woman doesnt understand.

There. Youve seen. Ive seen. The gesture. A woman in a traffic jam among those that are everyday in the city, any city. You wont remember it, you wont know who she is.

But I know because from the sight of her Ill find out as a story what was going to happen as the consequence of that commonplace embarrassment on the streets; where it was heading her for, and what. Her hands thrown up, open.

The young woman was down in a thoroughfare, a bazaar of all that the city had not been allowed to be by the laws and traditions of her parents generation. Breaking up in bars and cafs the inhibitions of the past has always been the work of the young, haphazard and selectively tolerant. She was on her way to where she would habitually meet, without arrangement, friends and friends of friends, whoever turned up. The L.A. Caf. Maybe most people in the street throngs didnt know the capitals stood for Los Angeles; saw them as some short version of the name of a proprietor, as the old-style Greek corner shop would carry the name of Stavros or Kimon. EL-AY. Whoever owned the caf thought the chosen name offered the inspiration of an imagined life-style to habitus, matching it with their own; probably he confused Los Angeles with San Francisco. The name of his caf was a statement. A place for the young; but also one where old survivors of the quarters past, ageing Hippies and Leftist Jews, grandfathers and grandmothers of the 1920s immigration who had not become prosperous bourgeois, could sit over a single coffee. Crazed peasants wandered from the rural areas gabbled and begged in the gutters outside. Hair from a barbers pavement booth blew the human felt of African hair onto the terrace. Prostitutes from Congo and Senegal sat at tables with the confidence of beauty queens.

Hi Julieas usual, beckoned. Her welcomers saw a graceful neck and face, naturally pale, reddened with emotion of some sort. Black and white, they fussed about her: Hi Julie, relax, whats up with you. There were two of her friends from university days, a journalist out of work who house-sat for absent owners, a couple who painted banners for rallies and pop concerts. There was indignation: this city. What shits.

All they care about is getting there

And where is it they think theyre getting to this from the hanger-on with a shining bald pate and a cape of grey locks falling from behind his ears; still unpublished but recognized from childhood as a poet and philosopher, by his mother.

Nothing gives a white male more of a kick than humiliating a woman driver.

Sexual stimulant for yahoos

Someone else shouted something like Idikaza mlungu Whats that, white bitch, isnt it? Her question to the black friend.

Well, just about as bad. This city, man!

But it was black men who helped me, of course.

Oh come on for a hand-out!

Her friends knew of a garage in the next street. With a wave from the wrist she left them to take the necessary practical step.

She feels hot gassy breath. Steel snouts and flashing teeth-grilles at her face. Inside her something struggles against them. Her heart summons her like a fist under her ribs, gasps rise within her up to her collar-bones. She is walking along the street, thats all, its nothing. Walking round a block to a garage. Its nothing, it was nothing, its over. Shudder. A traffic jam.

Theres the garage, as they said. As she walked in she saw its ordinariness, a landing on normality: vehicles as helpless, harmless victims upon hydraulic lifts, tools on benches, water dispenser, plastic cups and take-away food boxes, radio chattering, a man lying on his back half-under the belly of a car. There were two others preoccupied at some noisy machinery and they signalled her over to him. The legs and lower body wriggled down at the sound of her apologetic voice and the man emerged. He was young, in his greasy work-clothes, long hands oil-slicked at the dangle from long arms; he wasnt one of them the white man speaking Afrikaans to the black man at the machine but glossy dark-haired with black eyes blueish-shadowed. He listened to her without any reassuring attention or remark. She waited a moment in his silence.

So could you send someone to have a look the cars round the corner.

He stared at his hands. Just a minute while I clean up.

He carried a bulky handleless bag with a new battery and tools and it was awkward to walk beside him through the streets with people dodging around them, but she did not like to walk ahead of the garage man as if he were some sort of servant. In silence, he got the car going and drove back to the workshop with her as his passenger.

Theres still some I dont know in the ignition. Your car will stall again, I think.

Then Id better leave it with you. I suppose it needs a general service, anyway.

When was the last time?

She was culpable, smiling, I dont remember.

How long?

I suppose I just drive until something goes wrong.

He nodded slowly, did not speak: of course, thats your way.

Ill give a call to find out when its ready youre Mr ? Ask for Abdu.

She allowed the garage two or three days to do whatever was needed. When she called and asked by name for the mechanic who had taken charge of her car she was told he was out but it was certain the car was still under repair. This didnt matter, there was her fathers third car at her disposal, a handsome old Rover hed bought at a Sothebys auction and had refurbished, then seldom used. It was a car from The Suburbs, of a kind that wouldnt be ventured down in the quarter of the EL-AY Caf. When it was parked there under the admiring care of a well-tipped street man, people stood around to gaze at it, a denizen from another world, affluence as distant as space. She was not over-concerned that it would be stolen it was too unique to be easy to get away with undetected, and too grandly obsolete to be a profitable source of parts, if broken up. She was only uncomfortable at the idea of its exposure and hers, as its family occupant before her friends. She did not live in The Suburbs, where she had grown up, but in a series of backyard cottages adapted from servants quarters or in modest apartments of the kind they favoured, or had to, being unable to afford anything better. On the Sunday when she came to dose on therapeutic mineral water and coffee with the friends after a night at a club in Soweto where one of them was blowing the trumpet, she found three happy children and a baby in arms sitting on the gleaming bonnet and playing with the silver statuette of Mercury that was its figurehead. Her father just might have been amused by this new game on his vintage plaything, but she did not relate it because it wouldnt do to reveal to his young wife that the car was being driven around in unsuitable places that one was vigilant in protection of his possessions.