by Zeilig, Leo;
When they reached the gate to her house Biko dropped his hand from her back and put both of his hands into the deep pockets on either side of his jacket. In one pocket he felt the loose pages of his book. That morning he’d got in late to school – he’d been reading as he walked, the brittle, tanned pages disintegrating in his snatching, overeager fingers, his feet stumbling unguided on the road to school. The book was telling him something and he read hungrily, trying to grasp the meaning before the pages disintegrated entirely. Now, with Gertrude, the pages felt like a collection of autumn leaves. He struggled to rehearse the passages he’d committed to memory:
We are forever pursued by our actions. Their ordering, their circumstances and their motivation, may perfectly well come to be profoundly modified a posteriori. This is merely one of the snares that history and its various influences has on us. But can we escape becoming dizzy? And who can affirm that which does not haunt the whole of existence?
‘You can come in if you want, my mum will still be at the market,’ Gertrude said.
Biko heard her words, yet the meaning only came to him seconds later. He nodded his head and his entire body shook. He battled to coordinate his legs, to stop them from buckling and get them to propel him along the short path across the broken paving stones to the door. Gertrude reached the house, it seemed, in a single bound and pushed hard on the door. In the shadowed interior her face was half-lit. His hand perspired over the pages. Who would believe him? Gertrude seemed to Biko like a full woman pressed absurdly into the school uniform of a child. Her tall, perfect body made her aloof, even with her teachers. How sophisticated and how unlike the adults he knew.
The door opened into the kitchen, which smelt of food cooked on the single-ringed hob suspended over the gas cylinder, the table neat, with a plastic floral tablecloth and four clumsy chairs made from cast-off wood, the kind Biko saw being hawked on the edge of the township. There was a doorless arch that led to the lounge and a pile of mattresses leaning against the far kitchen wall. They were poorer than his family, he calculated quickly. Gertrude probably slept on the scrubbed kitchen floor with her younger brothers and sisters. She led Biko through the kitchen to the lounge and the torn sofa. The fridge rattled noisily, its dented white door held closed by a clumsily knotted piece of wire.
Gertrude let her school bag slide from her shoulder, fell on the sofa and patted the place next to her. Quickly Biko removed his jacket, which seemed incongruous and new in her house. He folded it carefully over the arm of the sofa.
‘Let me try it on, go on.’ Before Biko could respond Gertrude had jumped up, taken the jacket from the sofa and thrust in her arms. The padded shoulders slopped on her, the cuffs swallowing half of her hands. She strutted up and down the small room, admiring the jacket. Occasionally she raised her eyes coyly to Biko. ‘What do you think, mudiwa? It looks better on me than you, no?’
Biko was still trying to drain his head of blood, slow his racing heart, the unbearable expectation that emptied him of words, let alone coherent sentences. No one did this to him, nothing silenced him. ‘It looks fine,’ he said dumbly.
‘Only fine?’
The front door swung open and hit the kitchen wall. A small girl wearing a grey school dress, her hair scraped into pigtails, ran into the room. She looked at her sister, then at Biko, and rolled her eyes, her smile exposing her missing teeth. ‘Who’s that?’ she demanded.
Gertrude swivelled on her heels, turned to the girl and shouted, ‘Akungitshiye! Play in the garden, I tell you!’
The girl sucked her teeth and laughed at the couple. Even the children today are being rude, behaving strangely, Biko thought. The girl ran out.
Gertrude turned to her guest, her hands in his jacket pockets. ‘What are these?’ She pulled out a fistful of yellowed pages and read slowly, ‘The couple is no longer shut in upon itself. It no longer finds its end in itself. It is no longer the result of the natural instinct of the per ... pet ... uation of the species, nor the institution ... alised means of satisfying one’s sexuality ... The Algerian couple, in becoming a link in the revolutionary organisation, is transformed into a unit of existence ...’
He needed to leave. If he got back before the sunset he’d see his mother. He’d sit by her bed and read to her, even if she was motionless and didn’t speak.
Biko heard the front door close, but a moment later it opened again. The girl’s small, spongy fingers pushed gently until there was enough room for her to squeeze through, though not enough to make the door yawn and alert the couple. The girl beckoned to a boy her age to follow, and together they tiptoed on the bare concrete floor and stood to either side of the archway, watching.
It was a cold early winter evening and Gertrude had to work quickly. ‘I want the jacket,’ she said matter-of-factly, as if they were discussing a trade of fruit in a school packed lunch. She rolled up the sleeves, creasing the arms, the cool, mauve lining that felt like a caress when Biko put it on in the morning; the fabric sliding and licking his bare arms in his regulation short-sleeved school shirt. His mother had sewn the label in carefully, perfectly above the inside pocket, with his name in capitals: STEPHAN MUTAWURWA. When she’d presented the jacket to him, pulled it up his arms, hooked it over his shoulder and dusted imaginary dirt from the lapels, she stood back, came forward, did up the buttons, undid them, sizing her tall son, cocked her head to the side and moved him as if he was a mannequin in an Edgar’s shop window in Bulawayo. She looked at him in silence, peeled open the jacket, held the two sides open, felt and admired the lining, indicated with a slight nod of her head the inside pocket and below it a smaller pocket for change. She seemed almost reluctant to let her son go. They savoured the moment, Biko striding around the bedroom gazing into the fragment of broken mirror that his mother held for him.
‘I want the jacket. We’ll do an exchange.’ Gertrude slipped the jacket from her shoulders and let it fall and crumple on the floor. Biko squirmed but didn’t move. Gertrude started to unbutton her shirt slowly, the fingers lingering on the strained cloth. ‘So what do you say, mudiwa?’ Her large, dirty white bra was exposed. Biko gazed at her slender, narrow waist. The sky-blue shirt hung to either side of her breasts.
‘This,’ she said, ‘for this,’ she pointed to the jacket on the floor.
Almost unable to speak, Biko groaned affirmation. The children stared from their hiding place, their breath, like Biko’s, stolen, fixing them in place.
Gertrude fell to her knees, parted Biko’s legs and began to release his belt, pulling it away from his waist, gripping the leather strap to spring the metal buckle. Biko’s trousers opened and Gertrude fingered the zipper, pulling it over his stiff organ.
Biko swallowed loudly but his mouth remained dry. His father would hit him for coming home late and for losing his jacket. There was nothing arbitrary about his father’s discipline: it came if there was any infraction to his code. If the children returned late or were insolent, if there was a bad mark at school – even Biko’s older sister, Janet, a clerk at a Bulawayo solicitor’s firm, was hit and she took it, her eyes bulging, her face flushed. His father was slightly built but strong, his slim arms hard, and he would pull the children into his chest, embrace them, let them feel his stiff, sinewy form.
Gertrude rolled down his boxer shorts. Biko’s penis twitched rhythmically as if it beat blood around his body, flooding his head, commanding his spirit.
The front door is always locked, but the back door that leads to the hall is normally open, Biko thought. I can climb over the low fence, put my foot on the handle, lever myself over. I may be able to get in without him seeing.
Gertrude directed Biko to the sofa and then dribbled saliva into the palm of her right hand. She cradled Biko’s penis and started to masturbate him. The children hidden in the kitchen craned, strained to see, their mouths open.
Biko groaned as Gertrude’s hand thrashed faster and faster. If Mother has died, he won’t hit me when I come in. He won’t even notice
that the jacket is missing. Instead he will pull me to him. The house will be full. The cover will be drawn to her neck and the women of the neighbourhood will be chanting and praying loudly. If she’s died.
Biko was losing control. The children inched forward and stood openly in the doorway. Biko saw them, but he was already taken. Something seized his spine; he arched backwards, pressing his shoulders into the sofa, lifting his groin forward, up. Still Gertrude pounded. It was as if he was being possessed, a new being entering his body, forcing him into a different shape, contorting him in an agony of pleasure. The children watched, terrified at what tortured mutation would emerge. They drew even further into the room. Biko’s taut body finally broke, and he let out a cry that he didn’t recognise. As he came the children stepped backwards. Biko’s eyes closed. Jets of come shot out in three great streams, over the sofa, onto the floor, leaving a streak of pearly white beads across his shirt. And Gertrude kept moving her hand hard against his balls and up again, until the last drop pulsed out with a final squeeze of her hand. He was completely drained. He dropped back into his seat. The children sighed, gulped in the air, and noisily turned and ran out of the house.
Biko made his way through the township. It could be cold in the early winter; around July the wind blew through the lanes of tin and brick houses and made the roofs flap and rattle. There was a large population of prostitutes, who came out at dusk. They used the shadowed alleyways between the shebeens or the bush ringing the shanty town. When Biko was smaller he would lead gangs of friends into the bush to follow a prostitute and her client and watch the unstifled fucking. Semen, still visible, sometimes stained the well-trodden path.
*
No sooner had Viktor built Tendai up, turned him into a colossus of the liberation movement, an eccentric genius of the continent’s great, tragic history of revolt and plunder, a one-man freedom fighter who joined the Global South with the crisis-ridden North, than Tendai veered off and plunged headlong into the garbage. Why couldn’t Tendai just be an honourable goddamn stereotype, a cliché, a figure of unequivocal righteousness – drawn in bold realism with a jutting Lenin jaw, beautiful and serene?
Viktor trudged along the corridor, his feet sinking into the baize carpet, the thick pile slowing his strides. He’d dropped his keys into Tendai’s hand and Tendai had practically pushed Viktor into the hall, his hand curled over his shoulder. ‘We’ll talk more tomorrow. Don’t worry, Vik, this place is perfect cover.’ What did he want to talk about? The betrayal of the ANC? His prison sentence? The struggle in London for pensions, sick pay and holidays? Or Tendai’s sex plans, the office turned into a boudoir, the PhD interrupted again by their love triangle?
Right now Viktor wanted less complication and more predictability. He pressed the button for the lift; a red light illuminated the downward arrow. Viktor turned and pushed hard against the stairwell door. As he started to descend he heard the bell, then the doors to the lift opening.
Tendai, he thought, was absurd, with those dark glasses covering his bloodshot eyes.
The mild breeze caressed Viktor as he walked to the tube. Nina had cancelled the mediation. ‘If you can pay for it.’ Her email had been so angry she couldn’t write his name, or her own; instead she had signed off with a single lowercase n. Anger stripped Nina of her grammar, made her put a premium on words, as if it was costing her to write to him. It was two hundred pounds, two hundred more than he could afford. ‘It only works, Mr Isaacs, if both parties contribute and pay an equal share. In these circumstances, maybe Ms Thompson is not ready for mediation.’
No mediation, no Rosa. Viktor wondered why everyone was in such a rush in the morning to get to the office and again in the evening. These eager, aching souls, so much noise and chaos, no spiritual peace – just the rush home, the panic, the television, a restless sleep. No mediation. The words went round and round in Viktor’s head. Last week Tendai had been unyielding: ‘You can’t play with these bourgeois institutions, marriage, the family, and expect to come out unscathed.’
‘I wasn’t actually married,’ Viktor answered pathetically.
‘Whatever, Vik, you wanted children, a family, then after a time you decided you didn’t want it any more. It’s not a revolving door. You go in, and when you try to get out you find yourself pursued and hated, with lawyers, police, the courts.’
‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘You have basically lived most of your life like a bohemian, an artisan, and it doesn’t go with these other’ – Tendai searched for the word – ‘structures. You can’t get out just like that when you want, man.’
Viktor took the stairs to the tube, pushed past the queue to the lifts; the wind spun around the spiral staircase, catching his hair. Maybe I should have had the threesome. Perhaps Tendai needs it to escape the years in prison, the past, the UK Border Agency, the disappointment with Mandela, with Mugabe, with me.
Viktor saw Nina laughing, falling back on the bed, trying to pull on her stockings. Viktor and Rosa stood at the foot of the bed, loving her together. The threesome. Suddenly Viktor’s stomach felt swollen with missing, the mistakes, with Tendai’s sorrow. He heard Tendai’s words once more: ‘You see, Vik, the fight we were waging wasn’t the fight we were prepared for.’
Viktor had started to medicate again for his insomnia. When the prescription sleeping pills ran out he moved on to Kalms Tablets, a handful at a time. He even took them in the morning, after his second coffee, to compensate for the rising panic the caffeine awoke in him. In the afternoon he took another mouthful before his tutorial groups, and again when he tried to sleep. When the Kalms Tablets didn’t work, he took pure, concentrated valerian in 300 mg capsules, six a night. With this complicated alchemy Viktor managed to remain stoned. Tendai – a master at fooling doctors – had secured six months’ supply of Tripoline and split the script down the middle, three months each for him and Viktor. Between their university conversations, the emails and the drugs, the men lived and slept the same doped, dreamless life.
For a week, since the office had become Tendai’s base, the desks had been pushed together to create a series of underground tunnels between their metal legs, so Tendai could crawl and sleep at night without tripping the light sensors. It was an urban guerrilla’s warren right in the heart of the university, the enemy camp. He handed Tendai coffee, cradled like a prayer. Tendai was fully dressed; only his feet were bare. The room was stuffy. A tangle of blankets spilled out from under the labyrinth of desks.
‘You see, com, we were great activists. We came up with our own responses, we made our own means. The courts, the street committees, everything. But we never translated it into how we could rethink liberation – our weakness, Vik.’ Tendai held the paper cup of coffee in his two hands. Viktor had not slept. He’d waited impatiently for the morning, dopey, exhausted, unable to lie still or get up.
‘We never brought,’ Tendai paused, ‘our practice into contact with theory.’
Viktor followed Tendai, put his coffee down and spoke with the same irritation. ‘Yes, this is what I am trying to write about in my dissertation. The mythical belief in the power of the liberator is linked ontologically to the lack of confidence in the people in their own power. So we have to develop a more fully articulated counter-hegemonic ideology. A theory that can provide us with everything.’ As he spoke he sprinkled the carpet with coffee and saliva.
Tendai rubbed his foot, cracked the knuckles on his toes, ‘Oh, Vik.’ He spoke softly. ‘What you need is less theory. Get it the right way round. You can have your ideas, your theories, the PhD, after liberation. You need to spend some time in a township, not in a bloody school.’ Then, raising his voice, ‘Practice, experience; the rest is sterile nonsense. If you haven’t seen and lived, what good are you?’
Viktor sulked silently.
Nina had screamed down the phone: ‘Your mum’s a fucking bitch, your dad’s bloody useless. Your life is a complete disaster.’
‘I hope Rosa’s asleep,’ he
had answered pathetically.
‘Well, what do you care? You’ll read it in the newspaper if she dies in a road accident.’
‘Please don’t talk like that.’
It was not the insults to his parents and the hypothetical death of Rosa that kept him up after the call, but the thought that perhaps Nina was right and his life was a disaster. Tendai could see it. Everyone knew that he was bloody useless, a bitch, a disaster.
‘I am going to the toilet,’ Viktor announced to Tendai and left the room.
He undid his belt, let his trousers fall, patted the pockets of his jacket for his phone, then sat on the toilet and scrolled through the list of operas until he found The Marriage of Figaro. He skipped the first tracks to find the song he needed, ‘Cosa Sento’, and pushed the headphones deep into his ears, letting the music interrupt the voices of reprimand and correction – the truth in both Tendai’s and Nina’s words. He tried to concentrate on the lyrics, letting them carry him away from gravity’s pull, lift him above the steely London sky to the uninterrupted blue light, following the planet’s rotation, always above the clouds, forever in the day, away from the night: Non so più cosa son.