by Zeilig, Leo;
*
When Viktor returned to the office, Gary, Wayne and Moreblessing were sitting together, lined up on the swivel chairs. Tendai sat on the table, his empty shoes on the floor like giant upturned shells echoing with the sound of the sea. Moreblessing was speaking.
‘I had to argue with Audrey, Emma and Geoffrey not to leave the union. “Three months in the union,” they said, “and nothing has changed.” Audrey nearly hit the hall warden yesterday when he told her to finish cleaning the room even though she was at the end of her shift. “Three months and nothing,” she kept repeating. BCW owe us overtime. At last count sixty of us had not been paid for two months. Two months. And when Terry takes this up with them – at the Partnership Forum – they say they’re having problems with their payroll department, that the systems are down. We’re going to lose members. Three months in the union for most of them and still nothing.’ Moreblessing’s hair was straight, shoulder-length, with a centre parting. She sat on the edge of her chair. When she stood she reached Viktor’s chest, yet she was broad, her shoulders square, her neck ringed with faint lines, her skin dark, with a small but prominent mole under her nose.
‘Patience is a vice,’ Tendai said.
‘Three months, and they already want to leave the union.’ Gary was a stalwart organiser and union representative, but in these meetings – the Militant Caucus – he posed as the liberal union man, always seeking the counter-argument, imagining himself in an agony of contortion and metamorphosis. ‘We need to defuse the anger – go round and talk to them. I am available. I will lean on Terry to pressure BCW.’
Viktor sat by the door and listened to Wayne’s handsome American English, the short, informed sentences always clear. ‘You heard Moreblessing, Gary, the system is broken. It’s a joke. The forum is a joke. It keeps Terry, senior management, BCW and the vice chancellor happy, but it has delivered nothing. The system is broken; we have to do something now.’ Wayne was the youngest in the room. He was also the anomaly, a twenty-five-year-old MA student dispatched by his well-connected family from New York, his idiomatic Spanish learnt from the family’s Mexican maid and nanny. He was Moreblessing’s height, with a stubbled chin, receding, short-clipped hair and red, dry, blotched skin.
People, Viktor thought, are simple, well-meaning, goodwilled. We want to be treated fairly and if we are, we glow. It takes so little to make any of us feel the community and solidarity of our species. The thought made him feel proud: that he’d given Tendai his office, that he had, even now with his mute presence, played a part in this worthy battle to demystify oppression and expose the university.
Tendai spoke after Wayne. ‘Gary, man, our role is not to defuse the anger of the cleaners. Do you understand that, when we’re not paid, we don’t eat? That is not a metaphor.’ He turned and looked at Viktor. ‘When the cleaners and security guards are not paid, how do we send money back for our families? We need to strike, we have to.’
Some sentences are meant to hang in the air. Tendai had thrown down the word strike as if placing in front of them a complete, fully built crossroads. Wayne and Gary blinked.
Tendai brought them back to life with a deep laugh. ‘You Brits, you fools! I mention strike action and it stuns you into silence and paralysis. Don’t do a Terry on me – the strike weapon as last resort, we don’t want to disrupt the Forum, our good relations with BCW and Human Resources. Bullshit, man. You know, years ago in South Africa I remember wondering why, after more than a hundred years of working-class struggle, the UK had not delivered us from capitalism. We looked to the trade union movement in the UK, but you are completely enslaved!’ Tendai’s tone was severe and bitter.
‘I’m American,’ Wayne asserted.
‘You’ll be denounced,’ Gary said. With his pure activism, free of party dogma, he saw the union’s only purpose as its members. The hectoring full-time officials were occasionally useful, normally not. If the cleaners, security guards, Tendai and Moreblessing decided to strike, then by virtue of this simple, democratic formula he would support them.
‘Denounced by who?’ Moreblessing asked. ‘The union will support us.’
Though Wayne did not really understand Viktor, he appreciated his passive support, the blog posts he’d written on the campaign and that Wayne had edited – removing the references to philosophy, the long descriptions of slavery, the master, hermeneutics, the call for therapeutic violence – and turned them into leaflets. Wayne also understood practice, shorn of ideology and political obfuscation. To this end he had, more than anyone else, recruited members to the union, spent months with the cleaners, speaking in Spanish, preparing multilingual leaflets and translating union propaganda. His strange hybrid family of wealthy New York liberals had taught him discipline and perseverance. His mother, a brilliant organiser of soup kitchens, charities and campaigns, was always holding on, waiting for Lefty, for a new campaigning leader of the Democrats. Someone more like Roosevelt, like JFK. Wayne was committed to changing lives today and realising small, possible dreams tomorrow – not the tomorrow of theory, the New Era, the Promised Land, but the simple day-after-today. He didn’t understand Viktor’s abstractions.
‘Will the outsourced workers support the strike?’ Wayne asked.
‘More than that, if we don’t strike now, soon, we will lose members, dozens, and then they will strike anyway.’ Tendai’s goading was never cruel. He stretched and yawned loudly, clicking his back, then flipped his shoes up and pushed his feet in.
‘I’ll spread the word. The cleaners are meeting at lunch. I will need Wayne to translate for Maria, Juliette and the others. The union will be behind us,’ Moreblessing said as she stood. She lifted her hand above her head for a high five and Tendai slapped it.
Viktor stayed by the door, still distracted. ‘What do you think, Vik?’ Gary asked. Viktor was staring at the group, his eyes stinging. He imagined the men’s penises, each sliding in and out like trombones, unaware as they carried on speaking. Maybe this is what Tendai meant, the cock as a metaphor for the strike, a code for organising, for expansion, for growing the struggle.
‘Viktor?’ Gary repeated.
Viktor surfaced. ‘I am with you. All of you. I will write a piece, a satirical article attacking the vice chancellor.’
Chapter Sixteen
For all the high-minded attention to theory and his online search for truth, Viktor cajoled himself to sleep with YouTube clips on his phone. With the lights out, his glasses reflected scenes of jungle mayhem: hippos savaging crocodiles in Kruger National Park, American safari tourists commenting in the background: ‘Look at the croc, the hippo has him in his mouth; he’s holding him with his tusks. That boy has had it.’ In another clip, watched five million times, a man was mauled by a bear in a zoo. Each time the effect was the same: Viktor would become profoundly depressed, the adrenaline coursing through his body, keeping him awake, his mouth dry. He was convinced that these wild animals were like him, caught in a necessary, brutal fight for meat, trapped by their own personalities, sex obsessions, unyielding natures and complexes, their low, violent egos like his.
Viktor made the inventory of his own life, the charge sheet read out in judgment of his failures. There was the porn, sometimes three times a night. He searched for videos of amateur couples – like him, he thought, lovemaking he could believe in, a story that revealed life’s proper character, where love could be detected as the couple hammered into each other. What sort of father leaves his daughter for pornography? His penis enflamed, masturbating at night when he should be pulling the covers over Rosa, reading her to sleep.
The buildings, the network of roads, the hospitals and services, the friendliness on the tube only disguised what we really were: bodies, thousands, millions of them, muscular, angry, sweating, grunting and fucking. His refusal, he realised, to commit completely to the strike – to his colleagues, his parents, his daughter – could be put down to all this fucking.
‘Daddy,’ Rosa had asked him the other day,
‘are you part of Mummy’s family?’
‘Not really, sweetie.’
‘Well, are you part of mine?’
‘Yes, of course. You are my only child. My number one.’
‘But I am part of Mummy’s family.’
‘Perhaps I am, then, sort of.’
‘Are you married to Mummy?’
‘No.’
‘But you made me.’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘I’m confused by all this family thing.’
*
Biko knew his father would be looking out for him, the evening guests, neighbours, friends gone. He would haul himself over the fence without a noise and let himself in through the back door. The bedroom he now shared with his sister was the first room he would pass. In the morning, he thought, he could wear his old nylon blazer. His father would silently hit him, but if his mother had died he would be spared the punishment. Biko remembered the pages he’d left in the pocket of the traded jacket: ‘What is involved here is not the emergence of an ambivalence, but rather a mutation, a radical change of valence, not a back-and-forth movement but a dialectical progression.’ The fantastical language of revolution spoke of a world mutated by struggle, a new and re-cerebralised consciousness – an end to poverty and suffering and a promise to turn men and women into equals.
The agents of this revolution would be the lowest of the low, the wretched, lumpen poor, living like he did, in Third World cities and slums. They would cast their fists against the oppressor and give vent at last to their hearts, to their guts, to their pounding heavy chests. There was an answer to his anger, to the township’s wrongs, in these pages, the glue binding dry, flaking on the clustered pages, those strands of thread hanging from them. He started to run past a group of children who were kicking a ball of crushed paper and rubbish in their bare feet. The gravel billowed clouds of dust. Perhaps he should go back. She’d already have thrown the pages out, and he would never know how the story ended. But now the pages were lost – his mother too, soon, unless he ran hard against the path, stirred up the road. He could forget, if he could run faster.
Biko’s thoughts returned to Gertrude. He was sprinting. When he should have been at home, he had been with Gertrude. Never again. His foot stumbled on a rock and he slowed down. More direction in the future, towards a goal. Study, understand, focus, organise. Work up the slum, the country, against the grain. Rid it of thugs and murderers. Remember who they are. Remember the Gukunranda. Commit the names of the dead to memory. He felt his calves give out, throbbing. His back was wet; his loose shirt clung to his body.
Biko held the door to stop it clattering against the wall, easing it open with his hand, but still there was the sharp scratching of its hinges. He could hear his father – he knew it was him even though he had not heard that sound before. There was something in the low, deep pitch of his howling that could only be his father. When Biko entered the kitchen, his father was squatting on the floor, his arms holding his head. Biko’s sister stood motionless at the table staring at her father’s crouched, folded form, the strongman brought low. Emmerson stood, his red, bloodshot eyes fixed on Biko. He moved round the table and held his son in his arms.
*
After four weeks the strike won. It seemed to Viktor as though everyone in the world had, in their own way, participated in the victory. At the core of the strike were the cleaners from Zimbabwe, Poland and Peru. Even the others, those who could be classified in the symbols of our time as white, English, were in reality hybrid islanders. Gary was from Jersey, where, he claimed, he had acquired his thick skin, his weathered, salt-splashed face and alcohol problem.
The strike had been coming for months. The long-predicted wave crashed hours after BCW gave out monthly payslips to its staff and not a single hour of that month’s overtime had been calculated or paid. Whether it was incompetence or provocation, the cleaners decided that the arrogance, the petty, constant bullying, the long hours and the diabolical pay were now too much. Though a noticeable shudder went through the staff when the envelopes were torn open, it took some kind of vanguard to start the strike – a spontaneity that is always the start of organisation.
Four Zimbabwean cleaners left their posts, abandoned their carts and walked through the university corridors side by side, calling to other cleaners to down their mops, to the security guards to turn off the infernal radios pinned to their lapels, to all of their colleagues, their camaradas, their towarzysze, to straighten their backs and join them for a meeting. Later the women would recall the feeling; how they were overtaken by an anger greater than themselves, controlling the university, feeling as though they had finally come to life, the students and lecturers parting in wordless awe before their bustling, focused fury.
When the meeting resolved to strike illegally – though the matter of the law was not discussed – two of their number, Moreblessing and Wayne, volunteered to prepare a statement and a list of demands. As the word spread, others walked out. Some of the cleaners broke their mops and turned over their carts, leaving the toilets and lobbies strewn with buckets and cleaning fluids. Their subjugation and humiliation, which had for so long seemed permanent, was obliterated in the first hours of the strike.
The porters who delivered tea and coffee to the deans for meetings removed the trays of white cups and saucers from their trolleys and dropped them on the ground. The loud shattering of china made them laugh. They broke the cheap tin tea urns, the flood of tea on the carpets and tiles threatening to drown the university. Others locked away their equipment in cupboards to which only they had access. In this way a large percentage of the university’s tea and coffee utensils were removed entirely from the game. This simple genius meant that in a few minutes, every department, senior management meeting, seminar and conference at the university was immediately affected by the strike. Strikers carried along by the quickening, ripening atmosphere recognised that, to deans, professors, doctors and chief executives, not having morning tea is a fate worse than death. If the strike had succeeded in nothing else, starving the university of tea, coffee and biscuits had hit at the entire superstructure of London higher education.
So great was that initial momentum that even those who habitually doubted became staunch and unlikely defenders of the action. The whole rich square mile of Bloomsbury was caught up in the strike, wealth and complacency rubbed out as buckets commandeered for the purpose were rattled on every street corner, passed around each neighbouring university and workplace. In three days every university in Bloomsbury had sent donations for the strike fund and delegates to the picket lines, to stand stamping the life back into their sore, cold feet and their doubting souls.
Gary, in his calm, sedate manner, was overjoyed. ‘We are going to win this dispute! We’ll push out Terry and the union bureaucrats from our branch and give back dignity to the outsourced workers. No’ – he suddenly proclaimed, correcting himself – ‘the workers will win that dignity for themselves.’ The union full-timers hurried to the large, impromptu picket line to tell the cleaners, pickets and security guards that this was not how you run a strike. The strike could not be supported. Indeed, the union would have to denounce the strike or the government would sequester and seize its funds. If the workers wanted to strike, then there were procedures, legal methods that must be followed.
The day was bright. Fallen leaves sprinkled the car park where the workers stood, the winter sun stone-white – as if, Viktor fancied, the entire sorrowful solar system, the far galaxies and universe, watched the distant fight and heard the drums now beating on the picket line. Viktor decided that the picket-line drumbeat was a celestial message. This was the message Nina had been looking for when she stared at the moon: it wasn’t just for her but for all of us.
‘Viktor, come back! Ground control to Major Tom!’ Gary snapped his fingers in front of Viktor’s face and shook his arm. ‘I need you to find Wayne. We need him to translate for Terry.’
On the morning of the third day
Terry had blustered into the crowd shouting, using his bulk to shoulder through the strike, muttering profanities, speaking and reprimanding members he recognised. ‘Bloody hell, do you know how long it’s taken us to sit down and negotiate? Tawanda, you should have known better. Fucking hell, where are Gary and Wayne?’
When Wayne was eventually found, Terry was fully worked up, bristling and erect, the hair on the back of his neck raised. He stood in front of the crowd, waved his hands, flapping them, trying to lift himself above the ground, to defy gravity. But Terry had misjudged their mood. He thought that he could hector them with his normal bombast, his customary appeal to good sense and to his high office. What he did not count on was that these familiar members, some of whom he had recruited himself, were no longer the same. The strikers were rowdy, still giddy on their audacity, their bloody-minded action, the shock that they were no longer the same work-tired, humbled creatures who huddled around radiators in the basement and thawed out their fingers on chipped mugs of coffee before their morning shifts. Their moorings had snapped. They were not sure who they’d become.
‘Can you shut them up?’ Terry’s face blushed red and white. His throat was dry. Next to him were Wayne and Tendai, the milk crate dragged into place as a podium. Wayne spoke in Spanish: ‘This buffoon, este idiota, from the union office wants to speak.’
For the performance, the theatre of it, Tendai also addressed the crowd in Shona, although there wasn’t a Zimbabwean in the crowd who didn’t understand Terry’s English. ‘Terry ibenzi. Pane mhando mbiri dzemapenzi, mhando yekutanga ndeye mapenzi anoziva zvaanoita asi ronyarara zvaro. Kozouya mapenzi anonatsoita wupenzi hwawo. Terry ndozibenzi rokupedzisira.’ (‘Terry is a fool. There are two types of fools: those who know they are fools and keep quiet, and those fools who practise their foolishness. Terry is the last type.’) The crowd laughed.