The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page B

compliment to reach the ears of Mr Motsamai but he was too centred in other animated company to hear it above his own bass. Glances turned to place the one so favoured and a woman pleased to be in the know offered an aside. —That’s the black lawyer who saved the son of the Summers’ great friends. Such nice people, awful affair. Got him off with only seven years for that ghastly murder a few years ago—the son shot the homosexual who seduced his girl, and he’d had an affair with him, himself. Could have been life in prison.—
    â€˜Relocate’ they say. The couple are ‘relocating’.
    If one were to overhear this—do they know what they’re talking about?
    When in doubt go to the dictionary.
    â€˜Locate: to discover the exact locality of a person or thing; to enter, take possession of.’
    To discover the exact location of a ‘thing’ is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?
    To take possession of—a land-claim, a gold mine, etc.? The land-claim, the gold mine—the clever lawyer who’s just been praised can tell how to go about taking possession of the land, the gold mine, (if it’s worth possessing at all according to present inside information) may be gained by a take-over or merger. To discover and take over possession of oneself, is that secretly the meaning of ‘relocation’ as it is shaped by the tongue and lips in substitution for ’immigration’?
    â€˜Relocate’ they’re saying. It’s the current euphemism for pulling up anchor and going somewhere else, either perforce or because of the constrictions of poverty or politics, or by choice of ambition and belief that there’s an even more privileged life, safe from the pitchforks and AK-47s of the rebellious poor and the handguns of the criminals. It’s not a matter of unpacking furniture in new premises. Some of the dictionary definitions of the root word ‘locate’ give away the inexpressible yearning that cannot be explained by ambition, privilege, or even fear of others. Promised land, an Australia, if you like.
    A farewell is also a celebration of immigration as a human solution. No-one here brings to mind it’s not the first time. Giles Yelverton. Hein Straus. Mario Marini. Debby and Glen Horwitz. Top (nickname) Ivanovic. Sandy and Alison McLeod. Owen Williams. Danielle (née Le Sueur) and Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his daughter Julie. Generations have buried this category of theirs along with the grandfathers but all these are immigrants by descent. Only the lawyer Motsamai, among them, is the exception. He was here; he is here; a possession of self. Perhaps. Lawyer with the triumph of famous cases behind him, turned financier, what he has become must be what he wishes to be; his name remains in unchanged identity with where his life began and continues to be lived.
    The fêted couple are about to be immigrants. Sittingamong the gathering Julie is seeing the couple as those—her father’s kind of people—who may move about the world welcome everywhere, as they please, while someone has to live disguised as a grease-monkey without a name.
    Her father appeared as they walked towards her car. They already had said their obligatory goodbyes. He halted her a moment with a staying gesture barely touching her shoulder. She turned to meet a face restored from childhood. —You’re all right?— The voice for her alone. And in the moment that would instantly seem as if it never happened, there was in her returning gaze, for him only, the understanding that she was asking the same: about him, her father, that there was between them this question to be shared, to be asked of him, his life, too.

Chapter 8
    That Sunday ended. There never need be another; he should be convinced, now. Her mother lives in California; that introduction, if he thought it necessary,