by Zeilig, Leo;
‘I see,’ Viktor said. ‘But I don’t think that changes my argument.’
Tendai laughed. The anger Viktor had raised quickly abated; he felt exhausted and staggered back to the ring of desks. Viktor soldiered on. ‘We have a duty to be decent, to our lovers as well as being’ – he struggled to find the words – ‘principled in the union. One cannot be traded for the other, no matter how confident we feel about our sexual needs.’
Tendai reached for a T-shirt and wiped his brow. ‘Okay, Viktor, I hear you. But remember, when your country invaded and settled in our lands, you tried to control our entire beings, our sex. You made a sin out of loving and joy. Brother, be careful with your words.’
Unflustered, laborious, Viktor replied, ‘That’s another error. I did not take away anything. My family was living in a Jewish shanty town in Romania during the Conference of Berlin in 1884, and on my mother’s side they were refugees from pogroms in Russia. What was done to you, Tendai, was also done to us. Your nation-versus-nation argument breaks down and can’t be joined even by that thing in your tracksuit.’ Viktor smiled and the men laughed.
‘But don’t take my last pleasure, my release, my escape, comrade. Leave me something. Let at least my body remain free and unoccupied by your Jewish, Zionist morality.’
‘Wrong again. I am not a Zionist! All I am saying is be careful. Sex has consequences, and power.’
‘ENOUGH!’ Tendai shouted, throwing the T-shirt to the floor. ‘Now the strike! Let’s speak about how we’re going to tear the fucking heart out of BCW and the university.’
*
Tendai didn’t understand Viktor’s crisis, nor could he ever have – the bundle of confused emotions, the choices, the dilemmas that this ungainly man shed like petals, his permanently knotted brow, the time wasted on his worries, his fingers falling heavily on his keyboard, on some absurd formula or incomprehensible formulation. Tendai knew the importance of book work, the need to study and read – all those years in prison had taught him that. But this was different. Viktor was lost. Life, for Viktor, it seemed to Tendai, was a series of questions that led only to entirely contradictory new questions. Despite Tendai’s refusal to become involved in personal issues, in the garbage of people’s lives, Viktor had ensnared him – and, if he was honest, he harboured a desire to unknot Viktor’s brow, to bring him some perspective.
‘On the one hand,’ Viktor said, the two men standing across Tendai’s dustcart, ‘I think it might be better for Rosa if I wasn’t in her life. She is affected by the rows between Nina and me. But on the other hand, without me around she’ll be lost. She’d be less able to find balance in her life.’
The strike was only five weeks over, yet the men cast furtive, nervous looks around them as the conversation unfolded. Over the whole car park, the distant, low winter horizon and the cars, the skip, the uneven paving stones, they kept watch. ‘The problem, Tendai, is that Nina and I should have stayed together, for Rosa and for ourselves. We were suited – the north London Jew and the working-class girl who did well for herself. But she became frustrated with me, present but always distracted. I never learnt anything.’ Viktor paused, stared blankly in front of him. ‘Still, it was the right decision to separate. It is better like this.’
Viktor rambled, looked into Tendai’s decorated dustcart, its stickers proclaiming Justice for Cleaners and Security Guards. End Low Pay. Support the Strike. Tendai decided that pointing out Viktor’s inconsistency didn’t work. Neither did laughing and stamping his feet to mark the place when the sentence broke down under the weight of another oxymoron. Nothing worked. Viktor would still be left where he had started – tottering on the edge of the cliff, always about to fall. Still Tendai tried to show him the necessity of resolution in all matters in life – to seize hold of what you wanted today.
*
Viktor and Anne-Marie continued to communicate by text, and the occasional email. The tone veered from fevered, intense, sexual messaging and conversations to questions about their lives and who they were – how they had been made and what life meant to them. That night, for the second time on Skype, Anne-Marie answered Viktor’s questions about her birth, flattered by his interest, his obsessive curiosity.
‘I was born in the Congo. The centre of the continent, of what you call “the heart of darkness”.’
‘Of course I know the Congo,’ Viktor replied eagerly, quickly. ‘I don’t call it that.’
‘I spent eight years in Kinshasa and then we moved to France. Do you know the Congo’s history?’
‘Yes, some.’
‘Well, I have a famous grandfather.’
‘Who?’
‘Guess.’
‘Mobutu?’
‘No. My family would chase you out of the house for even suggesting that.’
‘Well, I give up. Who?’
‘Five guesses, Mr London.’
‘Viktor.’
‘Okay, Mr Viktor, five guesses.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘No.’
‘When did he die?’
‘Yes-or-no questions only.’
‘I give up.’
‘You can’t. Four more questions.’
‘Was he very famous?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now you’re going to tell me that your grandfather was Lumumba.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Viktor said.
‘Patrice Lumumba was my grandfather.’
‘You mean figuratively, yes? The grandfather to every child of the Congo.’
‘No, my grandfather. My flesh and blood, mon pépé.’
‘Prove it,’ Viktor said, his disbelief beginning to break.
‘“We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognised only that might is right. The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed, and our country is now in the hands of its own children.” Or, if you want it in French, “La République du Congo a été proclamée et notre cher pays est maintenant entre les mains de ses propres enfants.”’
‘So tell me more, comrade Lumumba,’ he said.
‘When Mobutu declared that my grandfather was a national hero, my grandmother and mother returned home. She refused most of the official engagements, except the ones the family had to attend. And we lived in his home – we still do – on Boulevard du 30 Juin and went to the local school. Then all his children came back from Egypt, Hungary, France, each of them back to the country his murderer had made.’
‘You make it sound as if they didn’t want to return.’
‘No. But they were obeying their father’s orders. Their dead father and his insistence that everything would change in the Congo. “To my children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see no more, I wish that they be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects from them, comme il attend de chaque Congolais, d’accomplir la tâche sacrée de la reconstruction de notre indépendance et de notre souveraineté, for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.’
‘You can quote all his speeches?’
‘That was a letter to my grandmother, not a speech. It is the minimum you’d expect from a Lumumba, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’
Sitting in her darkened flat Anne-Marie laughed loudly, freely. ‘He thought the Congo would write its own history. We all lived in the old house, a gift from Mobutu, with my grandmother and my mother brought up on Patrice’s naivety, thinking she had to live out his wish. So literal. My grandfather’s curse – my mother, my aunts, my uncles.’
‘Curse?’ Viktor was breathless, impatient, he had begun to sweat.
‘He was wrong. Lumumba lost. We lost, but his children felt obliged to return to the Congo.’
‘Christ!’ Viktor stood suddenly in his office. He paced the room; he straightened his shou
lders. ‘Your grandfather was Lumumba. Lumumba. Do you realise how incredible that is? I had his speech pinned to my door when I was a student.’ Viktor moved back to his computer, stared into the camera, his forehead creased. ‘Yes, now I can see it. The resemblance. You look like him.’
‘No, I don’t!’ Anne-Marie exclaimed. She was used to surprise, white colleagues who would ask her to dispel the rumour, then proclaim their admiration for her grandfather’s stand against the Americans and the Belgians, those who now paid their salaries. But this performance, this man’s need to declare himself standing, this release of excitement with his entire body, his flailing, octopus arms, was different.
‘Listen, Mr London, my grandfather was wrong. He was an absolutist when he needed to compromise. He didn’t understand that a deal had to be made. Some sort of compromise needed to be made; death and sacrifice is never an answer.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Viktor declared. ‘The Belgians didn’t want to concede anything, nor did the Americans or the British. They wanted him gone. Eliminated. Instead your cautious, moderate grandfather simply stood up to them – the whole cabal of the West. For him, independence had to be independence.’
‘And for that he was murdered and we got Mobutu, the Congolese American, for more than thirty years.’ Anne-Marie leant back in her chair, enjoying Viktor’s performance.
‘No, no, he took a stand and didn’t budge and then took action to defend his position. Action. For that we will always be in his debt.’ Viktor’s mouth was dry; his heart beat heavily.
‘What good was he dead?’
‘He knew that he might have to die; that to defend the Congo it might be necessary to die. The necessity of death to achieve freedom,’ Viktor responded quickly.
‘Rubbish. It was hopeless, he was hopeless – you know, before he was arrested and transferred to Mobutu’s force, he tried to persuade the troops to release him. My mother used to tell us the story. Bedtime stories in the Lumumba household: this is how your grandfather was killed, children.’
Anne-Marie’s family – each of them – came into focus: her grandmother Pauline, more formidable and unyielding even than her husband, barefoot in the kitchen stirring the stew, her petticoat stained, the apron she never removed, that made her look like the household maid until she opened her mouth and a gush of Batetela came out, refusing until the end to speak even in Swahili or Lingala. Every decision a principle, Anne-Marie thought, my grandmother like my grandfather, their determination painted on the immense canvas of African politics and in each step of their lives, great and small. Pauline had disregarded everything the colonialists had brought: their language; the paved, useless city of Leopoldville; the poverty in her village of Onalua, in Kasai province, which had meant her parents had been forced to harvest rubber every year or starve.
Absent-mindedly, speaking quietly into the microphone, Anne-Marie said, ‘I adored my grandmother. She had an enormous amount of courage and an extraordinary zest for life. She was always so positive. She loved drinking and smoking but hid the cigarettes, because it had been illegal in her day. But she was also quite a stubborn woman. “Those who don’t work don’t eat,” she’d say, “but once the work is done we will party.”’
Before they left again for France in the eighties she had sat at her grandmother’s lined, sun-dried feet, looking at the thick rhino skin on her heels that meant she could walk across the city, on the rough gravel in the street, without looking down. Pauline told her granddaughter that she had argued with Patrice on the day of independence. She had refused to attend the ceremony with the Belgian king; furious with her husband, she threw his suit and shoes from the balcony of this house. Patrice had run outside in his underwear, gathering his clothes, dusting them down. All this on the most important day of their history.
Pauline joked that she was the only person who could silence Lumumba. Pauline and the Belgians.
Finally Viktor sat down, afraid that he would miss something.
‘He was a romantic,’ Anne-Marie continued. ‘He thought the world could be changed by speech. By a torrent of words.’
‘An idealist,’ Viktor said.
‘Like Nelson. Probably like you.’
‘I’ve never been compared to Lumumba.’ Viktor smiled.
‘I wasn’t paying you a compliment.’
Anne-Marie was amused by Viktor: his certainty, his conviction about something he knew nothing about. ‘In France no one had even heard of Lumumba, except our Congolese friends. I was a little black girl growing up in the banlieue in the eighties, missing my grandmother. My mother taught me pragmatism, getting what you can and not dying. I was about twelve and we were studying geography. The teacher – a tall man, maybe your height, Monsieur Couper – he was always trying to be our friend, and when he failed he was offended like a child and became cruel, brutale. In the winter some of us had to wear our coats in the salle de classe, because it was vraiment froid.’
The quicker Anne-Marie spoke, the more she stumbled on her English, chewed up the words, spat them out, replaced them with French. ‘En face d’une carte de l’Afrique – il est là et mon cœur battait fort et je pense que tout le monde pouvait m’entendre. Déjà, à douze ans, j’ai compris le racisme en France. Cet idiot et sa carte de l’Afrique. Avec la règle dans une main, il a mis son autre sur la carte de l’Afrique et dit: Ici, mes élèves, est le Kenya, ici, c’était le principe colonie de Grande Bretagne en Afrique. Nous étions tous de l’Afrique dans la classe, d’une manière ou d’une autre, et cet idiot montait Afrique de l’Ouest.’
‘Do you realise, Anne-Marie, that you’re speaking in French?’ Viktor queried.
Anne-Marie continued without hearing him: ‘So this idiot teacher covers up half of West Africa and says it’s Kenya. Then he points to the Congo, he’s learnt something at least, and says, “Here is the heart of Africa – where people still live in grass huts and worship the elements.”’
She picked up a book and read, mocking her teacher’s voice, ‘“Africa, south of the Sahara Desert, is inhabited almost entirely by peoples with very black skins. The opening up of the interior of Africa commenced with the expeditions of English-speaking explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley. But many groups of negroid peoples are now making rapid progress.” Then he says, I remember every word, il a demandé s’il y avait des étudiants du Congo dans la classe. “Is there anyone here from the Congo?” He’s just told us that we’re primitives and now he wants me to put my hand up, levez la main.’ Anne-Marie raised her hand.
‘So what happened?’
‘Rien.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Anne-Marie’s voice tailed off. ‘Rien du tout. Everyone is silent. There were four of us from the Congo and none of us put our hand up.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
Speaking in French about Paris, Anne-Marie’s accent changed, thick with her memories of the lycée. ‘When I left school a few hours later I had my hood up over my head and I cried all the way home. I have never felt closer to my grandfather than that day, the betrayal of everything he stood for, his stand against the racists. “We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and evening, because we are Negroes. Who will forget that to a black one said tu, certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honourable vous was reserved for whites alone?” His own grandchild didn’t defend her parents, her grandfather, to this, this, him, this ... tas de merde. Idiot!’ Anne-Marie’s eyes glistened. She let the tears fall, roll over her cheekbones, along the side of her nose, into her mouth, wetting her lips. Viktor wanted to lean forward and kiss her, to taste the salty, clear water.
‘I understand the sense of betrayals,’ Viktor said.
‘Ha. You’re not going to make me feel better. I don’t want your sorrow.’
‘I don’t want to sound trite. I think you let down the Congo – I think you let down your family.’
Anne-Marie was pleased with Viktor’s response. She continued, ‘I d
idn’t ever tell my mother. I told her I had fallen and hurt myself.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘I knew a professor like you in South Africa,’ Tendai started.
‘You knew a professor?’ Viktor repeated, looking at Tendai for the first time, his tone mocking.
‘Yes. He used to visit me when I was in prison.’
Viktor smiled.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Because I don’t believe you knew a professor.’
‘Because I’m African?’
‘No, because you’ve told me that no one visited you in prison,’ Viktor continued pedantically. ‘I mean, from the description of your life in South Africa, I don’t see any professors.’
‘Eissh, man, you’re stubborn.’
‘Okay, what about the professor?’ Viktor felt the chill of the day grip his legs and arms. He unbuttoned his coat, tucked his jumper into his trousers. He was pleased by the distraction, to be with Tendai.
‘The professor was like you, stubborn.’
‘Is this another one of your apocryphal stories?’
‘Just listen, goddamn it, man.’ Tendai stretched to his full height and put his rough hands and fingers together, holding them below his chest as he did when he spoke to a crowd – as though he was about to release a bird. ‘It was December 1995 and he was diagnosed with leukaemia. They sent him to Europe for treatment.’
‘Who is they?’
‘His friends. The university. Goddamn it, man, I don’t know. He returned and was better for a time. Then he got sick again. Worse this time. He was working on a book. A book,’ Tendai repeated.
Between the parked cars a woman walked towards them holding the hand of a small child. They were dressed alike: black, padded winter coats, tight like skin, the coils of their matching scarves wrapped around their necks. Viktor watched them approach; he lost the thread of Tendai’s story.
‘A book. Always distracted by a book. He knew that he didn’t have long and he had to finish the book. A book that was going to change the world, inoculate the people to lies, reveal the filth, show them how to fight. How the planet could be changed. But he had only months to finish the book.’