An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  She’s right, Viktor thought. Why can I only see the hotel’s two stars? Why can I only see this man and his phonecards?

  He tried to shake his head clear, refocus away from the man’s shame; he wanted to find a path to Nina’s world, her automated edit of human suffering. Nina had an ability to see the heated, welcoming reception, the complimentary chocolates on their pillows, the crisp, folded towels, while he saw the stained corridor carpet and that man, that hopeless, eternally present human being, sitting outside their hotel in the night, as he embraced Nina and bathed away the February freeze. Viktor knew that the whole of life, the erratic, fleeting joy of their weekend together, would be reduced in his memory to that man, that unknown, undesiring recipient of his pity. He tweeted the photo.

  @ViktorIsaacs #EuropeanCrisis in evidence on the streets of #Paris. #neoliberalism #austerity pic.twitter.co ...

  Viktor had thawed his frozen extremities in the short hotel bath, his legs bent and exposed. Nina read. He counted the hours, subtracted the time they would be asleep and comforted himself that soon this city break, this enforced hell, would be over.

  *

  I should have left her then, he said to himself now, should have got out when it was just a romance, before the memories and the doubts could set in, before he couldn’t imagine life without her, before Rosa. Before he had learnt never to travel with Nina, never to leave the city or plan a day trip without taking food for when she started to complain, to fuel her furnaces before it was too late.

  Viktor always acted too late.

  He saw the whole sequence of his life with Rosa, the weeks after her birth, the visits to the park, the unendurable tedium, the Chinese restaurant round the corner where they ate too often. He saw how, when she was almost three, she would stand on the plastic seat and stare at the goldfish and turn to him and say, ‘I am this tall’, and ‘Do they eat fish?’ and ‘Does the cooker say die, die, die to the fish and then cook them?’ The bright restaurant had embossed dragons breathing fire on the wall. Was this where Rosa had learnt her English starved of prepositions? ‘Rosa good. Eat Chinese food. Know how use chopsticks.’

  It was here, among those dragons and fish and the wonton noodles that he had watched his daughter grow up, amid the bickering hell of life with Nina and the constant indecision about leaving.

  But what he didn’t count on was how those memories of Rosa would always drag him back to the restaurant, the school, the playground. If he crossed the street where he had pushed her years before, or cast a fleeting, masochistic glance to the still swings and empty, childless pavilion on his way to work, he would see her not even as she had been: a blur of movement, the hurried, impatient rush to the next moment and his exhaustion. No. She would stand in front of him, frozen in a single frame of life, the colour of her cheeks, the patchwork cardigan with the pink arms sewn together in her mother’s clumsy stitches. Radiant, Rosa would stare at him, her head turned up to him from the pram, just to check that he was still there and that they were together. ‘All I need is you. All you need is me.’

  But it would be too late. She would already be gone.

  This was the danger.

  At every corner he glimpsed his daughter in the dark braids of a child skipping along holding her mother’s hand, the noisy crowd of children pouring out of a local school across his path. Why wasn’t I warned? he asked himself. Why did someone not tell me that I would be forever held down by my past with her? Rosa’s presence now loomed over everything he did. If only I had known what it meant.

  When he was not with her, Rosa was the only person in Viktor’s world and it was killing him.

  Part One:

  Love and Death

  Chapter One

  Viktor felt a hand slap his back. He jolted forward, looked up to see Tendai and pulled the headphones from his ears.

  ‘So are you coming, Viktor? The protest starts in thirty minutes. You can write about it if you like.’

  Tendai folded his tall frame into the chair next to Viktor. His fluorescent jacket was emblazoned with the initials of the company he worked for, Balford and Collins Workplace (BCW); over the letters Tendai had pinned a badge: Fair Pay, Justice for Cleaners, with the words circled in red.

  ‘No, I can’t. I have a deadline. I’m finishing an article.’ Viktor indicated his notebook, his hand holding his place under the black and red cover. ‘You know I am writing a piece on the campaign.’

  ‘Good, but we need your presence. Support from academic staff is important.’

  ‘I’m more student than staff. I don’t have a contract – zero hours. Worse than you, Tendai.’

  Tendai laughed derisively, stretched back in the chair, opened his arms and looked around the café at the muddled groups of students leaning over books, executives, men and women in suits, the canteen staff, three women like him from Zimbabwe – Rejoice, Patience, Sylvia. He dropped his head closer to Viktor’s and spoke in a loud whisper. ‘Fucking crap, Viktor, man. You are like the bosses, drinking your café lattes, listening to that ... that noise, and writing. While we, us’ – he indicated the women at the counter with a sweep of his arm – ‘the poor, the poor of the poor, we protest.’ Breaking his whisper, he laughed loudly again, so that people turned.

  ‘You have it all wrong, Tendai,’ Viktor answered calmly. ‘Being an academic today means poverty, insecurity – we’re proletarianised too. No contracts, no stable jobs, no benefits, no overtime. Déraciné, unrooted, forgotten, members of the poors.’

  ‘The poors!’ Tendai repeated, mocking.

  Viktor had a rule that functioned across British society. The worse the job, the more degrading and humiliating, the more cruel and bullying the bosses, the more respect he bestowed on the worker. In this formulation, exploitation and poverty were answered by politesse and gratitude. Yet in the face of Tendai’s goading he was unable to be entirely consistent with this rule.

  ‘You know,’ Viktor added, pushing his chair away from Tendai, ‘I am with you. I support the campaign.’

  ‘Mr Poors, we don’t need your seated support, your pity – we need your presence.’ Tendai could do this: get to the heart of the matter, stick the knife in and laugh so it stung with accuracy, yet the pain of the attack almost instantly dispersed. To press the point, Tendai shuffled his chair closer to Viktor’s, recovering the lost distance. ‘Some facts: one hundred and fifty new members of the union in six months, in your union branch. All in cleaning and security, all outsourced workers. A campaign – the biggest of any college at the University of London. The demands clear.’ He held his hand out, fingers spread, the skin between them fine and clear. ‘One, the London living wage. Two, sick pay. Three, pensions. And four, leave. Each demand is about simple parity with University of London workers, man. When we have won these, Viktor – and we will – we will then fight to get cleaning and security back in-house. The final blow against BCW.’

  Tendai wondered why he bothered. Viktor was hopeless, always immersed in his computer, his brow knitted as if he was Zimbabwean, as if he didn’t have papers, as if he was illegal – but this strange man, with his questions, his curiosity and worries and misplaced urgency, somehow softened Tendai.

  Tendai rose slowly, prising himself from the chair, leaning and pushing on the table. Finally Viktor answered, ‘If I finish this piece I will come.’

  ‘Make sure you do or I will fucking crush you, brother.’ Tendai motioned with his hands, a substance – Viktor, paper, capitalism – being crushed, then turned and left.

  Viktor watched him turn the collar of his jacket up, hoisting the hood over his head, bracing himself for the cold – tightening the drawstring so only his nose and upper lip were visible.

  Tendai’s exposed fingers grew numb in his fingerless gloves as he pushed the dustcart around the university, his books open, held down on the cart with elastic bands – fooling himself that he could read and study as he swept and cleaned. His pockets bulged with union forms and campaign material. In the win
ter he looked like a tramp and could be heard talking to himself, reading aloud. Oh, poor crippled Zimbabwean beggar, his weeping was all in vain, ’Cos that rich man was never gonna feed him again. The winter lasted six months on this infernal, ugly island, worse than Cape Town. Here the sun belonged to another, distant galaxy; the UK was a remote planet where real life could not exist.

  Tendai was not Tendai. He was Soneko Dotwana, and he was not Zimbabwean, he was South African – though what did it matter, these lines that divided Southern Africa, paralysing communities and imprisoning the people. Where there had always been movement, now there were only borders, death, lethargy. Tendai’s five-year stay in the UK was part of the historical movement of Africans, he reasoned. It was his right to disperse, roam, flee as we have always done, part of the peopling of the planet from Africa, filling Europe, the dark continent, with black faces. If the first human beings were African, then we, they, were also the first immigrants. We never travelled with papers. Why would we start now?

  When in the early twenty-first century Zimbabweans had headed south to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban and north to London, Tendai had bucked the continental trend and fled to Zimbabwe from South Africa. He fled to Mugabe’s proud Africa, to the project of resistance and anti-imperialism, and taken a Zimbabwean struggle name. The dream of socialism and freedom north of the Limpopo had dissolved into the air before it could even form. The only remnant of it that Tendai kept was his name. In a bar on his first night in Harare a drunken ZANU comrade called Tendai had listened to his story, slapped his shoulder and said, ‘Now you are Zimbabwean. You are our brother, this country is your home and we are your family. As a Zimbabwean, you can farm, take a wife, make a business.’ The ZANU comrade then asked him if he had chosen a Zimbabwean name for himself and Tendai responded with elation, ‘Yes, I want to name myself Tendai’ – a choice that had delighted the man.

  In London, then, he was Tendai.

  When Viktor had asked Tendai about Mugabe months ago, Tendai’s tongue had split, divided in two, his eyes narrowed. Yet when he spoke of Mandela – the Crowned Prince of Peace and Reconciliation, the poster boy of liberals and conservatives alike, the grey-haired old man in coloured shirts – Tendai spat. He rose on his feet. It seemed to Viktor that he actually floated, hovered over the ground, lifted by his words, his anger and bile still fresh with betrayal.

  ‘When the regime, the racists, the apartheid dogs, wanted to negotiate, they fingered Mandela – not because he was the best of the ANC, but because the clever bastards knew he would talk, bend, compromise on everything. Each clause and principle he would sell. And Mandela, in turn, with his cheap rhetoric, he reined in the movement, turned us on and off, man. Viktor, I didn’t even know Mandela’s name when I was in Crossroads in 1980. Mandela was the low point of our struggle, our failure, not the symbol of our hopes but the end of them. He was the counter-revolution.’

  To listen to Tendai was to be shaken by a gale. The rush of sentences left Viktor winded, his face pelted and sodden. For him Mandela, the man he’d watched being released from prison in 1990, was at worst a benign symbol of the transition, determined and uninteresting. But Tendai’s story tumbled and crashed noisily to the floor, upsetting his balance.

  ‘Okay, listen, man,’ Tendai said, trying to maintain his patience. It was late in the summer; Viktor stood across from him, on the other side of the dustcart. Tendai was in his T-shirt, the veins raised on his arms, his pale brown face moving as he shaped the story. ‘I was arrested in 1985 for murdering a black policeman and I was found not guilty, but in 1992, two years after your Mandela was released from prison, a prison like a hotel – with swimming pool, roof garden – your Mandela—’

  ‘He’s not my Mandela.’

  ‘Of course he is, you whites, you liberals love him. He’s yours.’

  ‘No, Tendai.’

  ‘Let me finish, man. In 1992 I am picked up again. I am living in Khayelitsha. Do know you it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me finish. It means new home. That’s where we were forcibly moved in 1986. South Africa’s third-largest slum: shacks, dirt, open sewers hidden on a fucking beach, behind the sand dunes.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’

  ‘Stop interrupting, man. This time they say they have new evidence, this time they say they have got some township girl, an ANC member, to lie and claim that I had killed the policeman and that I was a township criminal, a totsi. I was a troublemaker, a fighter, no totsi. Anyway, Vladimir—’

  ‘It’s Viktor.’

  ‘Okay, okay, man. On the eve of your elections in late 1993 I am given sixteen years in prison. I serve thirteen years, two months and twelve days.’

  ‘What?’ Viktor screwed up his eyes. ‘Why weren’t you released in 1994?’

  ‘You see, there you go again, man – you whites are all the same, you look the same and you think the same.’ Tendai opened his mouth wide, bared his teeth, turned his head to the sky and laughed. ‘Botha and de Klerk arrested hundreds of us, maybe thousands, for fighting the real struggle in the eighties. We were thrown in prison for so-called criminal acts and held until the new century. We died in prison for the new South Africa.’

  ‘But, but—’ Viktor stuttered.

  ‘Listen to me, man. The apartheid government arrested us and the ANC, the Communists, the exiles brought the townships to heel, under their control – that was the deal.’ Tendai waved his arms, spoke faster. ‘When the deals were made, the so-called legitimate prisoners were released. The illegitimate ones, the troublemakers, the comrades from the townships, we were left to rot. But not by mistake. Not some administrative error. It was easier for the ANC to govern South Africa with white power intact and us in prison. It was a systematic attempt, Vlad, to shut the lions up, those who led the struggle in the townships. Our blood did not flow with red, black and green, you know? We were making our own means. Are you keeping up, Vlad, man? The ANC wanted to clear the country of us. Apartheid and the ANC in partnership. Welcome to the new South Africa.’

  ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ Viktor put his hands on the cart, held himself up like Tendai.

  ‘No one does.’ Tendai looked exhausted suddenly. The thick lines on his face sagged.

  ‘What did you think would happen after the elections?’ Viktor’s voice was weak and quiet.

  ‘That night, the twenty-seventh of April, I thought I was going to be released in the morning. What a fool I was. The humiliation, man, of that night is a hard thing to bear. For weeks after you feel dead, even when you are alive.’

  The conversation was confusing in Viktor’s memory. As fast as he chased Tendai he couldn’t catch him, losing him in Southern Africa, countries that were remote, exotic to him, the people noble and poor.

  The sun scattered the speckled clouds and shone on the men. The London sun had its own peculiarities. The city, too, Viktor thought, didn’t really belong. London and all its people, the Congolese, the Polish, the Nigerians, the Zimbabweans, tossed about in the mid-Atlantic between the American, African and European coasts. Whatever this city was, it wasn’t English.

  Viktor dropped his bag and shuffled out of his jacket, letting it fall to the ground. His eyes stayed on Tendai, who continued, ‘I got out and the government gave me sixteen thousand rand – work that out, a few hundred rand for every year in prison. Fifty pounds per year. I went back to Khayelitsha. Three of my family dead, my two brothers, a sister lost to HIV. My mother lived in a shack hawking vegetables. She was a beggar feeding fifteen mouths: my two, my brother’s four, my sister’s three, her brother’s family. And this beautiful travesty shimmering on the dunes, the ocean spraying the shacks, sand blowing into our homes. While the whites and the rich blacks lived in the city without even seeing us. Do you know Cape Town, Vlad?’

  Viktor didn’t answer.

  ‘I travelled into the city and saw that nothing had changed. Nothing. The city is a monstrosity. You stand on the highest mountain and see the harbour, the
high-rises, the villas, the swimming pools, yet strain to see the poor. Only a trained eye can see the shanty town. Tin and wood. Two million invisible souls, the lives of the whites and a few blacks untouched like, like ...’ He struggled to find the noun, the place. ‘California. Like fucking Surrey. Behind their walls and security. You know what I saw, Vlad? I saw the ANC, I saw nothing. They had done nothing. And we were told to heal, to reconcile. How can you heal when you have no bread and you live in a shack?’

  Their faces were only inches from each other, Tendai’s spittle sprinkling Viktor’s face. Viktor’s mind was in a London state, Tendai’s story ringing in his ears. His ardour made Viktor’s head spin, but he found it difficult to understand. He was eager to grasp the meaning of Tendai’s story – a significance that could only be revealed in this city, in London, over this dustcart.

  ‘HEAL?’ Tendai screamed suddenly, then unleashed a peal of laughter. ‘Malls and surfers wearing Guevara T-shirts! Madiba’s a fucking fridge magnet, man. Liberation is a fashion statement. All of them were living while we suffered and died.’

  Still stunned, straining, Viktor asked, ‘Why did you move to Zimbabwe?’

  ‘Naivety, Vlad.’

  The two men were the same height: Viktor drawn thin like the neck of a guitar, Tendai broader. Standing up, Tendai put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. He laughed again. ‘Naivety,’ he repeated. ‘I left because when I saw those men and women, those whites, I wanted to kill them, with the necklace. You know about our tyres? “With these matches and tyres we will liberate South Africa”.’ Tendai shook an imaginary box of matches in the air in front of Viktor’s face. ‘I wanted them to burn in the middle of the streets, in the daytime, to die, like I’d killed that traitor in 1985. I felt murder every day. I’d walk to the city and have to steady myself.’ His grip tightened on Viktor’s shoulder. ‘I felt like – like the country was still occupied and we were still at war. I felt it here.’ With his other hand flat, Tendai pounded his chest. ‘I even started walking the city with a knife in my pocket, my fingers wrapped around it.’