An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  The couple were only a few of cars away from Viktor and Tendai. Viktor turned to face them. Tendai continued, ‘The only place that could save him or keep him alive a little longer was a clinic in America. But he refused to leave. For him America was still a place of lynch mobs and racists, so he stayed in South Africa and finished his book.’

  As the woman and child moved nearer to the two men and the dustcart, the small boy trailed behind his mother, fell back and jumped forward again.

  Tendai continued, ‘The only thing that mattered before this man died was his book. The sicker he got, the more he drove himself into writing. Waved away his wife, his son.’

  When the boy was alongside the two men he looked up and smiled. His whole face tightened and creased, his eyes narrowed, his cheeks bulged. His mouth opened into a gummy, spaced smile, revealing different-sized teeth. His forehead stretched, the eyebrows widened and spread. The boy’s face shone, breaking open to the stranger’s stare. Viktor felt his heart suddenly pound. Quickly he remembered to return the boy’s smile.

  Viktor held the smile on his face as they passed until his face ached. The boy’s head twisted, craning back. Then suddenly the boy raised his flat hand and blew a kiss. Viktor was startled. A smile was one thing, but a kiss blown across the few metres that separated them was something else entirely. What does it mean? Viktor wondered, his smile giving way to concern. Is it a sign? Does the boy know me?

  ‘A month before the man died, his wife – Vlad, are you listening, man? This man’s wife brought him news that his book had been published, and the first reviews had been excellent. Then do you know what happened? After he had used up his last months writing, he was now almost dead. Vlad! Vlad? Goddamn it, man, listen!’

  Viktor was still looking at the mother and son walking away. What would it be like, he thought, if each of us smiled and blew kisses at strangers? Is this the way? Would this make us feel better?

  ‘So she came into his hospital room with the news that his masterpiece was successful and he was done. He could die now in peace. And you know what he did?’

  Viktor uttered vaguely, ‘What?’

  ‘Did he rejoice with his son? No. He pushed them away again. Was he delighted to have completed the book that his entire essence had reached for and craved? No. Only then did he realise that he had days to live, and he writhed in horror at his end.’ Tendai gesticulated wildly, saw that Viktor wasn’t looking and screamed, ‘LISTEN, MAN!’

  The boy was still in sight. Viktor willed him to turn again and wave, send another kiss from his palm so he could cast his own back to the boy, tumbling, turning in the air – which would be his way of telling the child that he must continue giving kisses to strangers.

  ‘Did his book matter to him? Did it? Like hell. All that mattered to the man – listen, Vlad, Vik, this is the point – all that mattered was another day of life, a few more moments of existence. Do you hear me? That’s all that ever matters. All there ever is. No last book, but life, only life. A book weighs little against life. A particle, an ounce of life, is worth a dozen successful books.’

  Tendai waved his hands. ‘Do you hear me? Do you hear me?’ And in case Viktor hadn’t heard, Tendai screamed again, ‘EXISTENCE! There is nothing else. Seize it, Vlad. Goddamn it, man, are you listening?’

  Tendai spat out the last sentence, spraying spit over the dustcart and across his interlocutor: ‘He only understood life when it was over. Only the book. The book was all that mattered. If he was going to die, then at least he’d leave the book. This great manifesto to change the world.’

  After a moment, calmer, Tendai asked, ‘And have you heard of the book?’

  ‘I don’t even know who the professor is.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Viktor saw the small boy and his mother turn away from the university and disappear.

  Tendai didn’t speak; he extolled, his arms and hands shovelling the air, fanning the atmosphere.

  A colleague Viktor had spoken to a few times pushed through the far doors and started to weave between the cars. He swept back his thinning hair, exposing a bony forehead and pulsing temples. He was younger than Viktor, but his professional senior; he always seemed breezy, laughing easily in the corridor. During the strike – the great marker for the strikers – he had used the side door, avoiding the picket line, the drums and the petitions.

  Tendai concluded, flipping his final words in his hands, pushing them towards Viktor. ‘For these reasons you must go. You have to leave.’

  ‘Leave?’ Viktor queried. ‘Go where?’

  ‘To Zimbabwe.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tendai sighed, then laughed, throwing back his head and shoulders.

  The man greeted Viktor with a thin smile and said hello. Viktor was surprised and wondered with genuine astonishment how the man knew who he was. Somehow Viktor thought that the impression he made on the world rendered him invisible – that his face was a faint smear drawn on a dirty window.

  Growing irritated with Viktor’s refusal to listen, Tendai spoke loudly. ‘Wasn’t that your colleague who didn’t support the strike? The scab.’ In the distance the man heard. His head twitched slightly.

  ‘But why Zimbabwe?’ Viktor asked, trying to draw Tendai away from shouting an insult.

  Spent, Tendai put his hands on the dustcart, straightened his arms, hunched his shoulders. His head sank on his neck and he recovered his breath. ‘Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe,’ he repeated, distracted.

  ‘Why do I need to go to Zimbabwe?’

  ‘Because you need to get out of here, away from your people. Away. You are choking. Paralysed. Stuck. You need to dislodge your life from its groove. Derail yourself. Because you are bloody lost, man. Viktor, you are dying. Maybe you are already dead.’

  ‘But why Zimbabwe?’

  ‘Why not? I went to Zimbabwe from South Africa when I was lost, when I wanted to kill every umlungu in Cape Town. I became bloody Zimbabwean. I called myself Tendai.’

  ‘The last thing Zimbabwe needs is another white man.’

  ‘For god’s sake, man, I am the black nationalist, not you. Go to France, then. Poland, Russia. Just go somewhere.’

  ‘What about my daughter?’

  ‘Take her. Go without her. I don’t know. What good are you to her like this, anyway? You need the fire. You need to burn. If the strike – our bloody strike and victory – hasn’t clarified the world, then you need a sharper, harder plunge. You need capitalism without any clothes. Go and come back angry, with some rage, some action, some bloody practice, Viktor. With life, man.’

  He couldn’t tell Tendai, but Viktor had been hatching the same plan – Zimbabwe was where he had decided to go to consummate his plans, to learn, to act – and to see Anne-Marie. Though how could he avoid the distractions and actually leave?

  If Viktor left now, quickly, ran through the car park, he could maybe catch up with the boy, speak to the mother, bend down on one knee, stroke the child’s cheek, reassure him. Tell him that he had received the message, he had heard, seen, understood. If only he could find the boy and his mother, then everything would be solved. He could explain to Tendai later why he had to leave. He should tell the boy about the strike. About Moreblessing. If the boy met Moreblessing, he would understand everything. Her compact arms, so strong from cleaning, and how during the strike she would just open her mouth and let her life spring forth, the compressed pain, loss, anger, exhaustion frothing out of her lungs and heart. Moreblessing wasn’t scared of anyone. Viktor would tell the boy all of this; he needed to know, to see. The icy drizzle would spray the boy’s head, wet his face, his eyelashes catching the rain, turning the drops of water into tiny watery globes, each reflecting Viktor back to himself. Each sphere a witness to the truth of Moreblessing, of the strike, of Tendai and of his trip to Zimbabwe.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tendai had first given Viktor the idea of visiting Zimbabwe, but it was Rajeev Nasaden who employed him to work on the Zimbabwe Independent M
edia Centre, managed entirely online – which would allow him also to post on his own website, Mutations. Rajeev lived on the crashing wave of the twenty-first century, a beautiful, frenetic Londoner whose Indian parents owned two hundred local shops. ‘We’re a bloody racist cliché! My parents live in the same semi we moved into in 1972 when they arrived from Gujarat, but they have corner shops in every major town and city in the country. My brother is a banker in LA. I don’t talk to him.’

  Rajeev had round eyes drawn from perfect circles and eyelashes that scraped his glasses. He was known by every self-respecting London activist. They seemed to assemble around his life force. Yet he remained impervious to the men and women who fell in love with him, his concerns intensely focused on the last thing he wrote, on the land-grab by multinationals in Mozambique or the travesty of GM crops in South America. Nothing escaped his activist reach and, though he was obsessed with his ego, his ego was obsessed with activism.

  Viktor admired how Rajeev refused the distracting ephemera of love affairs. Rajeev respected Viktor’s contemplative approach to life, his political commitment and his blog – but Rajeev urged him to focus and fulfil himself by finally stepping in. Speaking on video chat two weeks before Viktor left, in gapless sentences, Rajeev’s voice rose to a high pitch, louder than Viktor’s objections. ‘You’ve spent life testing the water, nervously moving around the water’s edge, then running away when the bottom of your trousers catches the surf. Get in, Viktor. People will put you up. You can write at last for a movement, a people struggling against dictatorship and neoliberalism.’

  Rajeev spoke without taking a breath, so that there could be no place for doubt. Viktor wondered if a person could really be freed from self-questioning by the simple effort of speed and compression. Rajeev refused the anxiety that Viktor generated. In their diametrical, asymmetrical ways and their matching obsession with electronic communication, they understood each other perfectly. Viktor left on a mission to write for the ZIMC.

  *

  Viktor wore a silver bangle. In his first year with Nina, on a day trip to Whitstable, she had insisted on an elaborate present for his birthday. They had waited patiently for the bracelet to be slowly stretched, a four-hour procedure, until it could be prised over his hand and onto his wrist. Either his hand had grown or the silver had contracted, so the sign of Nina and the banal happiness of that day had held its place for eight years, refusing to yield even to soap.

  ‘It doesn’t come off,’ Viktor explained to the man processing his hand luggage, belt and computer through the curtained X-ray box. The man nodded. ‘And it always sets off the alarm.’

  ‘Then it’s probably better to take off your shoes, or you’ll only be sent back.’

  Dutifully, holding the side of the table, he bent and pulled off his black trainers. He felt a strange intimacy walking in front of strangers in Europe’s largest airport with no shoes, his trousers beltless, slack, treading on the gummy carpet.

  A tall black woman on the other side of the security arch beckoned to him. ‘Move through, move through, please, sir, with your arms raised.’ The machine buzzed. Viktor held his hands above his head and stood, smiling. ‘You’ll have to wait for my colleague,’ she said.

  ‘I’m happy for you to search me,’ Viktor responded.

  ‘I’m not allowed.’

  ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Viktor’s arms were still raised in surrender.

  When his turn came, Viktor was ready, as usual, with an explanation. ‘It’s been almost eight years and I haven’t been able to remove the bracelet. A present from my ex. Each time it’s the same, a hold-up.’

  ‘Sir, I will have to run my fingers inside the top of your trousers.’

  ‘That’s fine. Help yourself.’ Viktor felt the man’s breath on him, his fingers expertly touching him, running his cupped hands down his legs, grazing his crotch. The touch was comforting and it made Viktor want to cry, confide to the man, seek his solidarity. ‘We’re separated now but I can’t take the bracelet off, it doesn’t want to be removed. We have a daughter. It was such a nice day.’

  The man smiled, nodded knowingly, and reached for a small baton with a wide paddle-head. He began to pass it over Viktor’s chest, his crucified arms, reaching deftly behind him, bringing himself forward so the men stood body to body.

  ‘How old is she?’ the man asked.

  ‘She’ll be seven soon. Rosa. She’s called Rosa.’ Viktor spoke in a torrent. ‘I separated from her mother, though we tried to make it work. I don’t know what it was, the pressure, work, money. Do you have children? I’m leaving for a few weeks and then I’ll be back. Zimbabwe. Did you hear about the strike against BCW in London? Almost three weeks. Unofficial. They were forced to recognise the union, pay overtime. Are you unionised?’ Then, fingering his bracelet, his hands still over his head, Viktor concluded with, ‘The funny thing is that it was such a nice day in Whitstable. We were happy.’

  ‘You can drop your hands now.’ The man turned the bracelet around Viktor’s wrist, examining it. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘What?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘The bracelet is nice.’

  The man’s smile was soft and knowing. Viktor didn’t want to move. He wanted the search to continue, for everything to be found, his thoughts and secrets, all of his mistakes examined in this airy open confessional.

  ‘You can go now.’

  ‘Okay.’ Viktor found his bag, shoes and belt holding up the trays. For a moment he did not feel too bad about capitalism.

  What did it all mean? What did it mean that he was travelling to Zimbabwe, that his mother and Isaac were in London and his daughter somewhere else? What did any of it mean? He felt dizzy as he stepped onto the moving walkway. His head spun; his temples pounded. He was blocked, unable to escape. Images, smells, colours suffocated him. Viktor put a hand on each side of the moving rubber belt and tried to steady himself.

  He sat at the back of the departure gate. The bustle of activity around the fixed plastic chairs grated on him: the evident happiness of families, the children playing between the rows of seats, parents chatting together, oblivious, carefree. A small queue of passengers was already forming. Viktor silently mouthed his mantra: ‘I can still decide not to leave. I don’t have to go.’

  Viktor looked hopefully at a woman sitting opposite him. She had neat shoulder-length hair and a tidy blouse. Her face was pointed at the book on her lap; she was, perhaps, his age. She lifted her head to greet Viktor’s gaze and her book slipped from her folded legs and fell on the floor, the pages fanning out loudly. The woman seized the book and brought it back to her lap again, her fingers and knuckles straining to hold it. Viktor smiled sympathetically at her and she briefly, nervously returned his smile. Maybe this woman, this nascent romance, Viktor thought, will bring me the decisiveness I need. Help me to board the plane, build up my life again with the help of her love. He felt his heart flutter.

  A Tannoyed voice, lost in the steel and concrete rafters, sounded. People looked up, confused. The announcement sounded again. Viktor could feel his stomach turn; he looked around for the toilet. Their messages were so fevered, unreal, the calls so disembodied – full of fleeting lust and dreams – that Anne-Marie had not entirely believed Viktor three days ago when he had sent a text about his mission to report on Zimbabwe’s crisis for Mutations and to say he had booked a ticket and would arrive in a few days in Harare, and that she must inform the Society and Biko. Could Viktor really materialise? How does virtual become real, how does inaction become action in a life of remote connections and hypothetical existence? The only answer Viktor had received from concrete, actual, real and specific Zimbabwe was, ‘Really. Are you coming?’

  And now he asked himself the same question. ‘Really, really. Am I going?’

  Soon the hall was empty. The Tannoy sounded again. ‘Viktor Isaacs please proceed quickly to Gate 21.’ Viktor saw the flight attendant standing at the counter, mouthing the words into the microphone. He was the only
figure left on the plastic chairs. They know it’s me. He slipped further down the chair. Finally the solitary man came out from behind the desk and walked quickly towards Viktor. Viktor rummaged in his pocket for his phone and pulled it out violently. He thrust it quickly to his ear, pressing it hard against his head. The man moved deftly between the benches, weaving his way towards Viktor – the man who was holding up three hundred passengers and their families, the airport, the whole of Harare and Southern Africa. Could a solitary act of indecision from Heathrow halt the entire world?

  Viktor straightened himself in the chair, then leaning forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, he mumbled loudly into the phone. The man approached him. Viktor’s voice rose: ‘An operation? What should I do? No, goddamn it! I am at the airport, about to get on a flight. Should I come?’ The flight attendant, clipboard in hand, stood in front of him. ‘Sir, sir,’ he said urgently, ‘are you Mr Isaacs?’

  ‘Listen, I have to go now. Okay. Now. I’ll phone.’ Viktor dropped the phone from his ear, cut the imaginary call with exaggerated performance. ‘Yes,’ he said to the man’s question.

  ‘You are holding up the plane, sir. We have to go now. Can I have your boarding card and your passport?’

  Viktor held them out. The man snatched them from him, then raised a radio and spoke to his colleague.

  ‘Quickly,’ he snapped, enjoying the urgency, the break in the tedium of boarding. Another man had joined them, wearing a suit with airline insignia on the shoulders. Flanking Viktor, they passed the desk and moved into the tunnel stretching to the plane.

  ‘Christ!’ Viktor shouted as he moved along the passageway with his companions. ‘I don’t know what to do. My mother is in hospital.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir, but you have to decide.’

  The men were now at the gaping mouth of the plane, a slice of its interior exposed, passengers in Business Class visible in profile, settling into their seats with drinks. Two female flight attendants stood inside the plane by the door, another man outside the aircraft in a green vest.