An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Tendai loosened his hand from Viktor’s shoulder and raised his head to the sun to let the light and warmth caress his cheeks, his closed eyelids, his neck. He rocked his head from side to side.

  Viktor waited, breathless. Slowly, Tendai continued. ‘When I heard what was happening in Zimbabwe, with the white farmers chased out of the country and Mugabe raging against the British, the final stage of liberation – the Third Chimurenga, for the poor and landless – I had to leave before I killed. Before I started the war again with my own hands and was killed or sent back to prison.’ Tendai brought his hands tightly together around an invisible neck and wrung them.

  ‘Mugabe’s a thug,’ Viktor said.

  ‘What do you know, white man?’ Tendai scoffed. ‘Because he kicked the whites out? Armed his youth to take over the farms? Challenged British interests? Exposed the Americans? The IMF? What do you know?’ Tendai spat out the words. His voice boomed, his words angry, disembodied like the voice of an angel, god, Mugabe, Viktor thought. Involuntarily he stood back from the cart.

  ‘I’m better than that, Tendai. I mean Mugabe was insincere.’

  ‘He was.’ Tendai’s voice softened. ‘But I found that out by experience. What’s life without experience, Vlad? Just words – from the Global North, from newspapers, the TV. You have to see and feel for yourself. You have to know, try, fail, learn.’

  Viktor looked around him at the large, imposing stone towers of the university, the thin windows, the thick walls. Tendai pulled back the elastic on a facemask he stored on the cart, eased the band over his head and let the mask hang round his neck like a giant shell. ‘I can’t stay talking. I have to go.’ Tendai lifted the cart and balanced it on its middle wheels.

  Viktor was desperate. He tried to stall Tendai. ‘If South Africa was unchanged when you saw it again, then why doesn’t the war continue?’

  ‘Good question, Vlad.’ Tendai lowered the cart. ‘What is your theory, white man?’

  ‘Because you were in prison, right? You went to prison in 1992 and woke up in the 2000s. If you had lived in South Africa, in the townships, you wouldn’t have seen it – at least, not as you did. You had what Rolando Toro calls the third eye of perception; you could see the failure, because you had seen nothing at all. You never saw the event of liberation.’

  ‘Right and wrong, Vladimir.’

  The second problem, Viktor reasoned to himself, was how Tendai had survived. How had he emerged from prison with the same anger, violence, ready to fight again?

  ‘What was normal to my mother was a disgrace to me. You have to learn and keep learning oppression, man. In South Africa you have to be fooled every day. You have to relearn the normal. But you are also wrong, Vlad. My brother and sister fight, the township burns, barricades, tyres, riots – they cannot reconcile, there can be no reconciliation.’

  Tendai’s voice bounced off the walls in the courtyard, hit the windscreens of the cars, rebounded and came back to them. He raised his voice, almost shouted, almost sang, Viktor thought, like Mario in Tosca – Tre sbirri, una carrozza ... Va Tosca. Viktor imagined the guns sounding over the Thames, the London chorus singing, everyone in the university staring down at them from the prison windows, from behind their books.

  ‘You see, Vlad, they do not accept,’ Tendai repeated.

  Why does this man – Tendai, Soneko, whatever he’s called, thought Viktor, think I am Vladimir? Does he need me to have two names, like him – a struggle pseudonym? A split identity, British and Russian?

  Viktor was silent for moment, then he said, ‘It’s Viktor. With a K. Vi-k-tor. Not Vladimir. I am named after my grandfather.’

  ‘Okay, whatever you say, Vlad.’

  Chapter Two

  The packet arrived in a padded envelope. Viktor dropped his bag to the floor, the door still open. He knelt in the hall, a rectangle of light marking the balcony, the walkway light stretching into the darkened flat, parting the permanent night that lived in these sealed-off rooms. He pulled from the torn envelope the small cardboard box of sleeping pills sent dutifully by his sister Amy.

  Viktor turned the box in his hands, ran his fingers over the Braille, thought about that evening. The anxiety about sleep, for a few nights, already had started to fade.

  He and Nina traded drugs, laughed at each other’s lay knowledge picked up on the internet. ‘Should I take two Paracetamol tonight, sweetie?’ Nina sat on her side of the bed, her back to Viktor, hands twisted behind her, unfastening her bra.

  ‘If you’re worried about sleeping, rather take two Nytol. It’ll knock you out. You’re much too familiar with Paracetamol,’ Viktor replied.

  ‘What are you taking tonight, darling?’ Nina yawned, stretched her shoulders and back – straightened, sucking deeply on the air.

  ‘I’ve got a lecture in the morning. I don’t know. I thought maybe Paracodol – the codeine worked well last week.’

  Nina hauled the heavy duvet over her chest, pulling it to her chin.

  ‘Listen to us,’ she laughed. ‘We sound like dealers.’

  Viktor turned the light off, fell onto the bed, felt Nina’s warm skin. He moved close to her, put a leg over hers and reached for her hand.

  ‘We’re better than we’ve been. We haven’t taken Tramadol for weeks,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, Tramadol. Life is better on Tramadol.’

  Their fingers linked and knotted together under the cover.

  ‘Only it constipates you,’ Viktor commented wistfully.

  *

  By midday the sun was beating down on Cecil Avenue, which ran parallel along one side of the National University of Science and Technology, where Biko taught and studied for a PhD that appeared impossible to finish. It seemed that the louder, the more aggressive the heat, the more radiant the day, the louder Biko became; in opposition, with resistance, he swelled. He seemed to tower over all things – he was that blooming, swollen, growing star in a crowded room that people gathered around and drew towards without knowing why. Men were attracted to him even more than women; they felt greater and more generous, broader, for having heard his laughter, his arguments – for having been in his presence.

  All was straight in Biko’s form except his nose. That had been snapped at the bridge years ago at school when he fought a senior who, with the innocent, simple arrogance of entitlement, had pushed his way ahead of Biko in a queue for lunch. Smaller, adamant, ridiculous Biko had pushed back. Then the two uneven, unequal boys – Biko a head smaller than the older boy – had faced each other, Biko’s black eyes staring furiously. The momentary stand-off had ended when the boy had grabbed Biko’s shoulders and brought his head down on his nose. Stumbling back, still standing, blood pouring from his face, Biko had thrown his fists and charged.

  On the streets leading to the university, along with other members of the Society of Liberated Minds, Biko built activists. He developed and cajoled and bullied. To minds hard and stubborn he applied his arguments with brute strength; to those already rubbed up and eager, he encouraged and channelled and shepherded.

  In early September 2011 – unilaterally, without consulting the group’s loose leadership in Harare – he began planning a demonstration. Biko saw it all, the pieces, the patterns, and he rushed. The point was, he knew, that students’ anger was always ripe, their conditions overflowing for action. If Biko could help to lead, touch off the students at NUST, what other groups would follow? Everything was in the following. He had seen the heroics of student politics and knew students needed allies, needed to break their isolation, touch off the poor in the townships, the workers in the city – in Bulawayo, in Harare.

  Biko told the students that errors were more important than successes. ‘We learn, comrades, from our mistakes. We synthesise from our beatings, the bruises. From death we grow stronger.’ Yet despite himself, his wide reading, his endless practice, he was impatient. And this time he moved too quickly.

  What did he expect to achieve? Vaguely, he wanted a revolt that would spr
ead from Bulawayo to other cities and towns, first in the south and then, maybe, to the capital. To Harare. From the revolt in Bulawayo he would prove the importance of impatience over Nelson’s caution. Nelson, who spent too much time in the fetid air of the north, who, for all his brilliance, moved too slowly: the whole of Harare’s Society of Liberated Minds was infected by caution. Biko intended to show these comrades, these caution-mongers, that action begets action. Only with movement and audacity are we alive. Only then is there progress. He would give his life to the movement and grow the Society of Liberated Minds from its puny educationals and modest demonstrations into the force that it was already becoming in Bulawayo – a hurricane of resistance, of conscious fighters who could challenge the dictatorship.

  *

  Another email arrived from Tendai and with it more contradictions. Why did Tendai write to a man he saw every day, and in a language of socialist deliverance, describing with ecstatic, foolish optimism every struggle and act of global insubordination? What was going on? Why was this man of the African renaissance harsh and hostile in person and emollient and loving in his emails? Tendai was becoming two distinct people in Viktor’s life.

  Viktor,

  You may already know the good news from around Africa, of course.

  Senegal – mass demonstrations halt despot’s attempt to legislate himself another term, using stones against police repression.

  Burkina Faso – wow, now things in Ouaga are really heating up. Presidential Guard joined worker-student demos, after not getting what they expected.

  Uganda – food-price riots (a cause of unrest again, as prices rise over 41% higher – this is an IMF figure) have morphed into anti-government/anti-regime demos.

  Swaziland – ongoing pro-democracy demos, workers and students.

  Botswana – though the brilliant public sector strike remains suspended, the government is reeling.

  South Africa – 200,000 struck on Monday. 120,000 metalworkers on indefinite strike for 13% pay rise, 20% night-shift rise. 70,000 oil depot and refinery workers striking for 13% too, and a monthly minimum wage of £185 a month.

  So, comrade, do you know what this means? It’s no longer just MENA afire – it’s the Middle East AND North Africa AND the rest of Africa igniting too! And these days they have such an admirable model in the MENA revolts and revolutions ... so far.

  More later.

  Tendai

  *

  Viktor had delayed his visit to the doctor, hoping that he would wake cleansed by the night and a full sleep, free of the plunging despair that held him every day that January. He would knock back a black coffee in the morning at home, the hot liquid scalding his tongue and throat, and his head would spin. He took his second coffee at 8.30 a.m. at King’s Cross, bought from the same café booth each morning with his loyalty card. He waited in a queue of addicts like himself, all hauling themselves out of bed and into the winter. Each waited in a different state of disarray, their orders shouted back to them by the barista in faltering English as though they were being branded, licensed to enter the city. The bright-eyed Nepali woman, her hair tied back neatly, smiled at him every morning with intimacy. Oh, how he lived for that smile. When he was third in the queue, she looked across the small crowd and lifted her eyebrows at him: ‘Extra-hot soya latte, two shots, medium.’ Viktor kissed and sucked at the opening on the lid with the usual sinking realisation that this act – infantilised by a multinational, slurping obediently, in line for the 73 bus to take him to work – was his single moment of happiness in the day.

  Fondling his phone, his coffee between his legs, the liquid working its way through him, he composed his morning tweet:

  @ViktorIsaacs #KingLatte has enslaved a whole city w/pathetic pleasures & promises. Caffeinated, we work harder for less. #neoliberalism bit.ly/j3sr8f

  Skyward Viktor would fly, the second coffee propelling him further along the incline to the precipice. Sure enough, the crash always came late in the morning, however hard he tried to keep himself airborne. The afternoons, even with classes, the tutorials, marking, the entire rumpus of activity, were merciless. Never let it be said that depression is simply the toad of idleness.

  The doctor’s surgery was in the middle of the estate. The Meccano flats, with bright red, blue and green balconies, looked like Rosa’s make-believe Lego Town, with boutique businesses and bistros and underground parking for professional couples and singles who could pretend that they lived inside a post-postmodern utopia – at least until the caffeine wore off or their balconies started to rust. Viktor shuffled through the rotating door to the lobby and was welcomed by a chemical freshness. The reception desk looked like a hotel’s, smooth granite with embedded computer screens. A blankly staring, disorientated Viktor registered with the woman sitting behind the desk.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Viktor Isaacs.’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘October the tenth.’

  ‘Year?’

  Viktor leant forward and whispered: ‘1970.’

  ‘That’s too young to worry about your age,’ the woman said, her face barely reaching the counter.

  The radiant gleam of the room told a lie: that the health service worked, that it looked like this, polished, new and within easy reach – that health and life could be given out like perfectly cooked meals in an expensive restaurant. Sickness could not cling to these fixtures. There was no place for his depression on the fake-leather fitted benches, the varnished wood, the alloyed steel. The room seemed to refuse all infection. Only the public health posters on the notice board indicated that all was not well in the world outside the estate. Viktor read, shifting his weight from foot to foot:

  Dementia. Look out for the early signs:

  1. Forgetting the names of friends or everyday objects

  2. Having problems thinking or reasoning

  3. Struggling to remember recent events but easily recalling things that happened in the past.

  Viktor read the sign twice. His heart thumped. His jumper suddenly clung uncomfortably to his body.

  His father, Isaac, had phoned last week. ‘Jack died,’ he’d said, without preamble. ‘Jack is dead,’ Viktor muttered, still staring at the notice.

  Jack, their Jack, his Jack, his political lodestar – the man who dominated his boyhood existence, navigated him through the world – who looked like Pavarotti and sang like him too, with his large handsome stomach and black cab. He would sing to them when he was drunk, when he was happy for the mindless, simple joy of eating on the rare Shabbat they marked. He’d push away the casserole Viktor’s mother Sonia had baked and clear a space in front of him on the table, as though his voice needed the room. Then he would stand up in the middle of the noisy meal, his stomach pushing his trousers down, his heavy-knuckled hand heaving his weight up on the table, the chair scraping against the kitchen floor. Isaac would emit a delighted sigh, pouring more wine into everyone’s glasses – even a splash for Viktor and Amy. Then Jack, a hand scratching and kneading his bearded chin, would sing: Rodolfo in La Bohème, always the same part, the same aria, Act 1. The family pressed back in their chairs. Jack addressed each of them in turn, his voice strident. With Sonia, though, he lingered, saving the most beautiful lines for her; leaning forward across the table and touching her hand gently, he sang: Che gelida manina. Each time this great man, who already filled the kitchen, would cry as he sang.

  You can’t simply hand over a life like Jack’s. Is Jack dead?

  I have dementia. I am not depressed, I’m losing my mind. All I can think of has passed.

  ‘Viktor Isaacs?’ A young man with black spectacles and short blond hair stood in the lobby, looking at his notes.

  Jack is dead, Viktor thought as he followed the man along the darkened corridor. Jack is dead.

  The consulting room was standard issue: a large examination bed with a disposable paper towel spread across its entire length, a wraparound white curtain, large windows with aluminium blinds, the s
ort that Sonia had ordered years ago, Viktor thought, made to measure from Wilson’s Interiors, an incongruous shop on the high street between the launderette and newsagent. Their blinds had hung crooked against the window like broken wings.

  Viktor flinched. He wanted to move to the window and straighten the blind on the cord, measuring and adjusting the slats, as his mother had done when he was a child as if she was flying a kite from the kitchen window. These damn blinds made his guts turn, made him want to move in again with his parents, to help Sonia with her cooking, Isaac with the computer. How long had she saved for those blinds with the money she’d put away in the glass sweet jar behind the baking tins?

  ‘What seems to be wrong, Mr Isaacs?’

  The doctor is too young, Viktor thought. He wore a gold wedding ring, but his face was uncreased. There were no marks of life on his face, no shadow of a beard.

  ‘I’m depressed.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Can you tell me something about it? How long?’

  Viktor removed his glasses, looked ahead. ‘About a month - no, longer, I think. I have been depressed for maybe a year.’

  ‘Have you felt suicidal?’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know. I go to bed and wish I wouldn’t wake up. That’s not suicidal, I suppose. Is that normal? I lie trying to sleep and I fantasise about being executed by a guillotine. I dream of my head being cut off, in a painless second. Only after this can I really sleep. I think I have a guillotine complex – is there such a thing? You know, the guillotine was invented to free execution from cruelty and pain. It was meant to be humane. But I think it is the cruellest way to die. To be alive one minute, dead the next, for there to be no transition. They say the brain remains conscious for seconds after it has been severed from the body. Can you imagine anything more terrifying?’

  The doctor stared at Viktor. Then, after a pause, he asked, ‘What do you do?’