An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  The interview ended a few minutes later, with warmth. If Biko could have reached into the computer screen – and on the video Viktor posted on Mutations a few hours later, it looked as though he was trying to – he would have grabbed his interlocutor by the shoulders and shaken him in humour and goodwill. Viktor expressed his desire for the men to meet again, like this, across the cybersphere. ‘This is not meeting, comrade, nothing like it. If you want to meet, we need to do it in the flesh, and then you will see what I have been saying. Do you hear me? Then all of this, this’ – he spoke almost dismissively – ‘analysis will be clear to you and it will make sense. So if you want to see and feel for yourself, you must come.’

  There was something peculiar to Biko that Viktor couldn’t quite work out. He seemed old – not tired so much, but wise beyond his age, which was thirty-three. Viktor wanted to write about this, to find the tools and a framework for understanding. As he packed up his computer and the shared office slowly started to fill with postgraduate students and sessional lecturers, Viktor tried to work out the paradox. Biko’s vision seemed so great – there was a euphoria of expression. How easily he spoke of liberation and revolution. Viktor thought of his own political experiences, the generation of activists he knew. Our horizons are fixed on parochial concerns. We have never been stretched by such demands, by a dictatorship. Again Viktor felt he was on to something. ‘Goddamn it,’ he said aloud, so the students he passed in the corridor looked up at him, ‘we need a struggle against dictatorship or we’ll never grow as a people.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  What was it about his daughter he didn’t understand? He got her wide, black eyes, the shy twist of her face away from the Skype camera (to avoid her own stamp-sized image in the corner of the screen) on those long, painful calls. This much he understood. What he could not see was the adult in her, how the memory of everything they did together was imprinted with such precision in her mind, and then covered up, so convincingly, in her dance steps, in her child’s games. She recalled everything but never stated the recollection as an adult might: ‘When I saw my father in September he brought me a small bottle of lavender essence, and each night we would inhale its sweet smell and say that it would allow us to dream together. To share the same dream.’ Instead she remembered surreptitiously, secretly, with such silent pain, like a child. The memory delicate, like the smell of lavender in the air.

  On their weekend together he announced, ‘I brought this, sweetie,’ pulling the small vial out of his pocket. ‘Stand up.’

  Rosa jumped out of bed and reached for the bottle. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wait, Rosa.’ Viktor stood next to her bed. Levelling their heads, they stared at each other. ‘It’s lavender, but crushed into oil.’ He held the bottle forward so she could see. ‘The oil contains the smell. Now every night we need to do something with the oil.’ Rosa was jumping on the mattress. ‘But it only works if you are still.’

  Viktor unscrewed the lid, tipped up the small, brown bottle into his palm, then put the vial carefully down and rubbed his hands together quickly to create a spark, to set fire to the oil. Rosa was perfectly still, moving her eyes between his face and hands. ‘Once you have done this you cup your hands, sweetie, round your nose and breathe.’ He then sucked in deeply, his face masked by his cradled hands.

  ‘Now me, now me,’ she shouted and, methodically following the instructions, copied her father.

  ‘Only a drop on your hand,’ he warned. ‘That’s it, rub them together quickly.’ When she was done, she inhaled her fill. Rosa dropped her hands and stared at him, her eyes glowing.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Viktor added quickly. ‘Before you finish, you have to unruffle your sleep-wings so we can fly to each other in our dreams.’

  ‘Really?’ Rosa asked, her five years battling with her younger self, wanting to believe.

  ‘Absolutely. Like this—’ and Viktor raised his arms, moved his hands, stretched his wings.

  Rosa was transfixed; again, when he was done, she followed his instructions.

  When their separation was established and only phone calls and video streaming connected them, Rosa never mentioned the lavender, her sleep-wings, or the absurd night-time ritual on the bed, her eyes locked onto his with determined intent. If we both dream tonight, we can be together.

  Yet two days ago on the phone, she had said, ‘Should I read you my Christmas list?’

  ‘Okay, darling.’

  ‘Well, I want a kitten, a doll’s house, a pram and lavender essence. That’s all I want.’

  *

  Viktor picked Rosa up from Bristol. The thing that got him was the house. Even though Nina had someone who came round to tidy and to pick Rosa up from school three days a week, there was still an air of shabby neglect. It felt like this family – of mother and child – were only temporary sojourners in their own home. The furniture was carelessly bought and badly assembled, Rosa’s room painted a rough white, her colourful toys organised neatly on the chipboard shelves. There was nothing on the walls, though, no real effort, no alphabet chart, no cute kitten, just two tatty postcards from distant cousins. The house felt to Viktor like a holiday rental. Each room carried a faint whiff of what it should be. Their home was devoid of the rough and tumble of life.

  Viktor had done this. He had drained those rented bricks of family – so he thought. Nina’s now lined, permanently tired face sat on his conscience. He had done this to her as well.

  Only after Viktor had left Nina could he recall clearly all the moments that had led up to it, to each point, the last meal, the last night, their final conversation. Now he recalled them each and thought, At that point I could still have reversed the decision. Even afterwards, when they were apart and she was in Bristol and he in the bedsit in London, if he had stepped in then, he could still have reversed the decision to leave her.

  In their days together Rosa lost her first tooth, caught it in her hand as she was quietly sipping her hot chocolate. She had been wobbling this precious, small piece of ivory for days, refusing food, alerting strangers that it was loose. Yet when it actually tumbled to earth she took it to her father, who made a fuss and kissed her, announcing to the café that Rosa had lost her first tooth. ‘Please, Viktor, it’s only a tooth,’ she said firmly. They rolled up a piece of tissue paper and she soberly and methodically dabbed the bloodied gum. They then folded the tooth in the tissue and placed it inside a round silver box, decorated with plastic coloured jewels and tiny triangles of mirror. Rosa then spoke about how everyone she knew would be excited at her new smile, ‘Viktor, don’t tell Lara. She’ll say, “Rosa, you look different somehow.” And Mummy, Mummy will be amazed.’

  Viktor was now certain that he had failed the elemental lesson of life – yet another lesson – to bear witness, to be with the people you loved, to share with them as they experienced and rejoiced, hold on when life tried to break them, as they were broken, before they left. Then Viktor realised that this was the problem, the point: that life can never be saved until after the loss. Only the irrevocable makes us decisive and determined. Clawing back afterwards is always impossible.

  Nina’s love was like her outbursts: she made an enormous amount of noise, but behind it the wounds were never very deep. On the first weekend, when she stayed with her mother after the split, she discovered that she was strong and could see no way for the two of them to be together. How could love turn on two days’ conversations and wine with her mother? How could he be forgotten so easily?

  That weekend Viktor lay on his parents’ floor howling so loudly he was worried he would disturb the neighbours, with the memories of her coming into their flat, crossing the brown wool Persian rug with its geometric shapes, calling from the bathroom and toilet, her staccato presence frozen in each room. Now his head became choked with her. On the first week apart he couldn’t see a way through to clear the air.

  What a long arc of life – the frustrations, desires, joys, all for her. He recalled his ob
session with her body, the flattery of her form, her young, hard, insistent body, the firm rise of her breasts when between her legs he reached up and held them, played with her nipples, savoured her pleasure, her taste. How long did it take to find the way to that position? To that angle and precision, his head wedged between her thighs, resting on one leg, his tongue free, his hands touching her. How long had it taken to find this hold? A year? Yes, it was a year, he now remembered. That second trip to the bed-and-breakfast in Kent, how she said after she’d come, ‘We’ve found a new position that works well for us.’ He had laughed and waved her comment away.

  How long had it taken them to find a way through the rows, the absurd misunderstandings, the screaming? Three years? That’s it. It was three years. Those last three months, curse them, when the code had finally been cracked. How they had planned for the wedding they never had on that glorious, sweet, absurd day marching along the clifftop, planning with stones and a stick on the sand how the celebration would be organised and where the guests would sit. Remember how we laughed. How that made us feel, as though we were dancing inside. How long?

  All that time, and love turns on a weekend.

  Each moment in his life dragged up a memory. The train together into town, that trip, before Rosa was born, to Stonebridge, the casual forgotten walk from the station now summoned. Each place polluted, each occupied. Viktor had thought she was too beautiful for this to last. He summoned the sight of her again, in her underwear, her breasts pulled together tightly in her bra. How long was he trapped by her beauty, befuddled, lost? Two years?

  Through weeks he struggled, unable to divert himself with anything. His usual tricks to cast off melancholy only left his chest heaving in pain. He longed to get out of the country for a week, to move for a moment to a place free of her, but he could see no beyond, he could will forward no future free of her. Nina’s occupation of everything had settled hard on his life. Goddamn this virus, he shouted one night, still sobbing.

  Did I live those times, that life, alone? Were those memories my invention? What does it mean that I am broken, that she cannot see a future, however hard she tries, for us in London or Bristol? He didn’t mind so much that she had already consigned this life to her past, but her refusal to be paralysed by loss astonished him.

  ‘Let her move on, man,’ Tendai told him. ‘Let her have another lover.’

  How does she not feel the regret of lost life? Why doesn’t that stop her, like me, prevent her from breathing, like me?

  ‘You don’t know, it is not like that, comrade,’ Tendai told him, slapping him on the back. ‘But you need to get up. She hasn’t extinguished your force. You just need to turn off the light, see things anew. The dawn has come, Vik. The dawn. The fucking dawn.’

  *

  Recolonisation started slowly. Sheer time did this, in part: pacing up and down his parents’ street, rolling around in the sheets in the spare bed, the smell of her eradicated slowly from his skin. The memory of the sofa where they watched TV no longer so redolent of her movement around the flat. Then one night, when his parents were out, he ran the bath and lit candles. They threw uneven, nervous, twitching light into the dark room, with the sound of the radio and the tumbling, hopeful water filling the bath. In this din he managed to throw out the shadows and find relaxation as the warm water lapped over his body, immersed his thoughts, drowned his missing.

  *

  Before the protest, Gary had listed the Order of Service: ‘We start with Tendai on the mic. Then everyone comes in, the cast, the mock cleaners, the top hats. Wayne and me will be shouting orders and snapping the air with our riding crops. Then Tendai hands the megaphone to Moreblessing and while she speaks, we graffiti the wall. Moreblessing finishes, turns, we distribute the union leaflet about the campaign. Got it? Another run-through?’

  Tendai raised the loud-hailer above his head; Terry stretched, tiptoed, reached up. ‘Give me the fucking megaphone, Tendai,’ he growled.

  Keeping up his banter, Tendai handed the square plastic microphone to Moreblessing, who had come to his side. She put the microphone to her mouth, pressed the black trigger and spoke.

  Moreblessing did not flap in the wind. She stood unruffled by the storms of crisis, arrest, family death, defeat and failure. She was no heroine of London, of Harare North, as much as Viktor tried to see her as the repository of his exotic, romantic imaginings, a symbol of the UK’s underground workforce, clandestine, visa-less and noble – a sort of ambulating, collapsing nation in her single force. Instead she stood her ground with a certain dryness, an economy of emotion. Her caution came from the burdens she carried, the need for slow, steady steps so she wouldn’t stumble.

  Cautious in London, mouthy in Harare, only Moreblessing’s refusal to concede to unfairness remained unshaken. Despite Tendai’s appeal to the epic, the big story that drew everything together, she refused any political association. The external conditions of her life stripped her of humour, forced her to shed anything that was surplus to survival. ‘We’re Africans, Tendai. We’ve seen enough revolutions, enough tunnel vision, projects and transformation. Why haven’t you men learnt? With your ideas for another world that looks like Mugabe’s revolution – his chimurenga, only with new men in charge.’

  Moreblessing was a nurse, a midwife and a geographer with a master’s degree from the University of Zimbabwe. She was a mother of two children of her own and a wife to Jonathan, who had moved to Johannesburg and disappeared, and mother also to the three children of her dead sister in Gweru. She had arrived in London on a temporary visa and stayed, lived in a shared house in Stratford with school friends from Harare and worked without a visa cleaning the university from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon, then for the agency Caring Hands, on the night shift from six to six, looking after Derek, who had multiple sclerosis. In Moreblessing, Caring Hands secured a nurse and a carer for far below the minimum wage.

  Moreblessing pushed past Tendai and Terry and spoke without pause or hesitation in her perfect university English. ‘You may not be aware, but the majority of outsourced workers – me, Tendai, Patience and a hundred and fifty others who work for BCW – receive no statutory sick pay and the legal minimum of holidays and pension provision. When we are sick, because we don’t get paid we still come into work. So if you come away from the university sick, it may be because we’ve been forced to come into work unwell.’

  Terry continued to hiss, trying to distract her. Moreblessing held out her arm to keep him at a distance. Gary, with his lean, sinewy body, leapt onto the reception desk, reached for Wayne’s hand and pulled him onto the wooden counter. No one noticed them chalking on the far wall, behind the reception desk, EQUAL RIGHTS FOR CLEANERS.

  ‘We cannot visit our families. We have to cut holidays short so they fit with university closing times.’ Moreblessing hadn’t been home for five years – since she arrived. If she left the United Kingdom, she couldn’t return. The money she earned was worth more than her presence to her family, the great, draining, distant extended network of dependants who required her efforts for their survival. The Zimbabwe dozens with their clamouring needs – when one died another was born, or another child was orphaned. Her youngest, Dora, now twelve, wasn’t sleeping. Moreblessing soothed her deep sobs for her mother on the phone, a hand smothering her own tears, consuming the international phonecard in a single ten-minute call.

  ‘When we grow old we have to continue working, as we don’t have pensions. For the last year we have run a campaign for equal rights.’ Suddenly she turned to the wall behind her and paused her commanding, unembellished speech. The audience, which had grown and crowded the lobby four lines deep, turned with her and faced the chalk graffiti. She repeated, ‘EQUAL RIGHTS FOR CLEANERS.’ Everyone stared at the wall. The effect, the timing, the sudden appearance of Moreblessing’s words emblazoned on the wall made the crowd sigh together, then clap.

  Tendai, standing tall and wiry, the MC for this protest circus, bent down, put his m
outh to the microphone and repeated, ‘EQUAL RIGHTS FOR CLEANERS!’ Then, forgetting himself, he shouted, ‘Viva socialism! Viva the cleaners!’ and punched the air.

  ‘For a year we have held demonstrations and stunts and received thousands of emails in support. Dozens of organisations, MPs, party leaders, have supported the campaign. The university, this great centre of learning, is now regarded as hypocritical, a bedfellow to exploitation, not learning.’

  Defeated, with his thick arms folded high on his chest, Terry glared at Moreblessing. Everyone else turned to face the far wall, hoping that this small black magician would conjure more words, project another slogan onto the wall.

  ‘And the university refuses to consult with us. They say they are talking to BCW but these talks are meaningless if they do not involve us, the workers.’ The security guards paced nervously. Their radios crackled, popped, emitted faraway voices; the noise filled the silence between Moreblessing’s sentences.

  Despite everything – the defeats, the early starts, the hours of cleaning, the numbing buzz of static that rang all day in her head as she walked, enveloped in her ankle-length coat, to her second shift – Moreblessing believed that words, speeches, the simple act of description could persuade the system to concede to the logic of her explanation. The manifold proof presented to the university in leaflets, stunts, theatre, peaceful demonstrations, would eventually yield justice. Fair, proportionate protest would unravel unfair practice. She had an exaggerated confidence in the people. These people, watching her now, hanging on her words, if shown the right path, could not be deceived. When they held their protests, when she spoke, Tendai shepherding the crowd as Gary and Wayne appealed, the people would follow. Understand. Moreblessing forgot that she could not be everywhere at the same time and that there was no miracle of explanation or description.

  ‘Our campaign is not going away,’ she continued. ‘In the summer we have more action planned. In the autumn there will be mass protests and occupations with students. We are discussing strike action with our union.’