by Zeilig, Leo;
‘Sir, sir!’ was now being shouted at him, the charade of politeness stripped away.
‘Tell me, please, should I come to the hospital?’ Viktor shouted into the phone.
‘Right, we have to close the door. Step aside now.’ The flight attendant stepped back quickly into the plane, the heavy hinged door was heaved out for closure. ‘Step away, sir, now.’ Viktor was given another shove by the vested man. Sweat dripping off his phone, down his ear, onto his shoulder. The lethargic, stiff airplane door swung slowly into place. The staff on the plane stared at Viktor’s diminishing form.
It was not clear to him afterwards what made him drop his hand from his ear and throw himself, diving through the narrowing gap in the closing door, landing fully in the midriff of the flight attendant, winding him, sending him back onto the floor. For the sake of pure perversity Viktor threw himself – further into complexity, into crisis, onto the plane.
On Viktor’s impact the flight attendant tried to steady himself on the narrow sides of the galley kitchen, reeling, losing his footing. The man fell. The plane was thrown into confusion: passengers, who had heard the raised voices and agitation outside the plane, now saw a man lunging, throwing himself at the aircraft. From the cabin there was a loud collective sigh, then a series of exclamations and low screams.
Eventually Viktor stood and patted his trouser pockets for his phone. Flustered, he adjusted his jacket, stood in the entrance of the cabin and spoke to the Business Class passengers. ‘Everything is okay,’ he said, panting, his heart thrashing in his ears. ‘It is a family emergency. My mother has just been admitted to hospital in London. A heart problem.’ Then to the disbelieving faces, ‘It may be the end.’
The winded, injured flight attendant pulled him into the galley kitchen. ‘Sir, you have jeopardised the safety of the plane and the airport. You will sit in your seat now, sir, and for the rest of the flight not move. Sir, you could easily be fined for your behaviour.’
Viktor was escorted to his seat by two flight attendants, passengers bobbing up and down, hungry for gossip, as he moved row by row through the plane. Only now did he realise that his phone had flown in the opposite direction to his hurtling body and landed, not in front of him inside the aircraft, but behind him in the UK.
He sat on the plane, gasping not from the battle with the flight attendants but from the absurdity of his choice. The plane pitched and jerked as it ascended, the porthole shutters down and the fluorescent light of the miniature video screen lighting up his vertigo. Viktor imagined that he was aboard a spacecraft plunging through the earth’s atmosphere. Normally a nervous passenger, he was now surprisingly calm. The plastic lockers over the passengers creaked like old wood. Viktor marvelled at the thought that the plane might plummet to earth, break up and splinter over Central Africa, and he could be shaken free of life without having to do anything.
*
‘So why the hell are you coming to Harare?’ asked a red-faced man with a grin, strain showing on his taut, sun-bleached face as they shunted along the plane to the door and the portable stairwell.
‘Oh, work,’ Viktor said, trying to sound vague.
‘Work? In this fucking hellhole? What sort of work?’
Before he reached the exit the man had already begun to sweat. His accent was a low, lazy Southern African drawl. Viktor felt lost.
‘I’m a writer,’ Viktor said, edging along the narrow plastic corridor. He wanted to impress the man, then shut him up.
‘What sort of writer? A journalist? You have come to bring down our dictator? Well, one thing you have to understand is that this country is run by barbarians. They have just come out of the bush. They are stupid, uneducated bush monkeys.’
Viktor let out an involuntary exclamation: ‘What?’
‘Bush monkeys!’ the man shouted.
No one in the orderly, slow-moving line seemed to notice. Viktor had known racism, had heard people mutter abuse under their breath, but not with this confidence. The man’s statement was not made out of anger – just some sort of belligerent avowal.
‘Maybe talking about grown men and women as bush monkeys isn’t appropriate,’ Viktor answered.
‘They are fucking monkeys!’ the man repeated in a flat, factual tone. ‘You will see it soon enough.’
When Viktor emerged finally from the ordeal of customs at Harare International Airport, clutching his bags, the fat racist was waiting for him. ‘My name is Louis Kappas. I live in Harare. I’ll give you a lift.’ He didn’t wait for Viktor’s response but grabbed the two suitcases in an agile swoop and then passed them to a black man in worn jeans and a tracksuit top, who walked through the sliding doors with the bundle. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
Viktor had been meticulously planning the trip, studying maps and lists. If I go, he reasoned, I will have at least learnt the way to the guest house: up Sam Nujuma Street, then left to Herbert Chitepo Avenue and right to Mazowe Street. But he let Louis lead him to his car.
Rusting flagpoles lined the road from the airport. The traffic moved under a large concrete bridge emblazoned with the words Welcome to Zimbabwe. The short stretch of motorway to the city was scattered with slow-moving cars, and in the distance Viktor could see the skyline of the city, a large blue tower that shimmered in the morning heat. On the side of the road were smartly dressed people walking towards the city. Viktor bounced on the hard seat as Louis, his sleeves rolled up, his brow wet, jerked the car around the potholes, muttering curses between his infinite racist narrative.
Of all broken cities, why had he travelled to Harare? This hybrid metropolis, with its leafy suburbs, detached houses set back from the airport road with long front lawns and wide, generous porches, was now so disgruntled, the roads potholed and the manicured grass, the marvel of White Rhodesia, overgrown, the entire inland conurbation overtaken by crisis and failure.
‘Most of us left years ago,’ Louis explained. ‘This country was beautiful, it had everything, grew everything. Then this regime of fucking monkeys ruined it.’ He glanced towards Viktor. ‘We are going the way of the rest of the continent, every country north of here. The same incompetence, the same fucking monkeys. I used to live in Zambia, and it happened there. You don’t know anything, but you’ll see. It’s what happens when you allow blacks to take power. You see, they only have a tribal mentality, fucking monkeys.’
Louis slammed on the brakes. Ahead of them cars were banked up. A few vehicles were parked on the grassy verge beside the motorway. Already just visible between the cars, a small minibus lay on its side. Louis put his hand on the horn as his pick-up screeched to a stop, then reached for the window behind him, opened it, and shouted, ‘Godfrey, go and see what’s happened.’ Quiet, obedient Godfrey climbed out of the open boot and walked between the cars until the two men in the cab couldn’t see him any more.
When he returned, Godfrey spoke quickly. ‘Boss, there’s been an accident. Some people are dead. The ambulance can’t get through.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Louis said. ‘Come on.’ He beckoned to Viktor. ‘You’ll get your first lesson in the Dark Continent.’
They weaved their way through the traffic, the sun already hot on their backs, the open, blue sky filtering through the broad, sparsely leaved trees lining the road. Viktor looked around him. It felt strange, beautiful even.
As they moved closer to the accident, Viktor’s pace slowed as his gaze fixed on the bent, abnormal metal, the glass, the bloodstains. Louis trotted quickly towards it, Godfrey at his heels. There were small groups of people gathered in circles; apart from a single woman wailing, the place was silent. Viktor’s first thought was that they were praying. The bus was sprawled across the green embankment, its windows broken. Fanning out further over the verge, around the upturned vehicle, were bodies, completely still. Children, adults, thrown from the minibus, lying inert; detached fingers severed from a hand. Groups of people stood beside them.
Viktor stared. His stomach turned – a child lay o
n her stomach, her head turned to the sky.
Viktor heard Louis shouting, ‘Get out of the fucking way, someone help me!’
Viktor stopped walking and watched Louis, who scrambled between the bodies shouting, though his words were unclear. He saw Godfrey and Louis hurriedly moving the sprawled figures onto their sides. Louis dropped to the ground, crouching over one large, bloodied body and jerked the head back, opened the mouth, lowered his mouth for the kiss and breathed. The motion was slow, intimate, raising his head to catch his breath, then down again to breathe into the mouth. His movements were careful, the precision almost pedantic – his hand cupping the man’s face, adjusting the neck to ensure the flow of breath into the punctured, crushed chest. When this action seemed to fail he hammered the man’s chest, knowing already that it was futile; angry that this bastard black man, this fucking monkey, had refused his order to live.
After repeating the action over and over, he finally stood and moved on, this time to a teenage girl.
Viktor felt people brushing past him, moving to the scene. In the distance he heard the whine of sirens and over the cars the lights of an ambulance. Louis waved his arms at Viktor. ‘Grab the kid’s legs. Quick. I need to get back to the twin-cab before we get jammed in.’
The girl’s shirt had ripped, exposing her dirty white bra. One side of her face was disfigured by swelling and blood. One arm was bent, twisted hideously, as though reinvented with new, absurdist joints. Viktor took her legs under his arm. Godfrey changed places with Louis, freeing him to run ahead of them to the twin-cab.
When they reached the vehicle Louis had already reversed over the central reservations. The window down, his large arm hanging out of the cab, he hit the door as he spoke: ‘Put her in the back with Godfrey. We can get her to a clinic in the Avenues. They will only kill her at Parirenyatwa.’
Viktor and Godfrey edged the girl to the back of the pick-up. One eyelid flickered open. ‘Into the back, quick!’ Louis screamed.
The child was delivered to the hospital. Louis disappeared into the building with Godfrey, shouting at Viktor to sit in the café he indicated.
Strangely calm, Viktor sat down at a table outside under the large hanging trees. The avenues were wide, perfect, and the sun shone through the trees, dotting the pavement and the tables with uneven, flinching circles of light. Here, he thought, nothing happened, no death, no accident, no Zimbabwe.
There were two pretty white children, twins with short blond hair that was dishevelled and thin. They wore ill-fitting shirts bunched over their matching trousers. One child sat on his mother’s lap coughing, looking blankly at the adults in the café. The other child wandered around the garden, then crawled around the feet of the mother’s chair, clutching a small, dirty toy elephant that rang with an internal bell. After a moment the mother stood, stretched and dropped a few notes on the table with languid indifference. The children started to bicker and moan with the same aimless disinterest as their mother.
Thirty minutes later Louis emerged from the hospital. Viktor swigged back the last mouthful of coffee, placed five dollars in single bills under the saucer and joined Louis by the car.
Exhausted, Louis looked up at Viktor and leant on the back of the twin-cab. Godfrey stood behind him, his head bowed. Louis’s eyes were wet.
‘Look!’ he shouted finally, pointing into the boot. ‘Clean it up when we get back, Godfrey. I don’t want any of her kaffir blood in the cab.’
Part Three:
Harare
Chapter Twenty
The house was ringed by high terracotta walls decorated with razor wire, their gates controlled by a remote in the car. The tripwire and sensors screamed and shuddered in alarm if anyone black – who had not been invited in to clean, cook or garden – tried to enter the compound, to expropriate Louis’s expropriated wealth. Viktor spent his first days enjoying the simple absurdity of his situation, waking up in the morning on the oversized bed in the guest wing of Louis’s mock-Tudor house, full of endless corridors decorated with collages of family holidays: Kariba Dam, 2001, in the Drakensberg; 2008, en famille in Zanzibar, every member of the family on jet-skis, dining at large hotels, staring out of topless jeeps at animals, running into the water.
Why does this family holiday in Africa, Viktor thought as he made his way to breakfast on the first morning, if they hate Africans so much? Why do they even live in Africa? Why hasn’t Mugabe repatriated this family of Greek-Rhodesian Zimbabweans back to Athens? I must ask Louis, he muttered to himself.
One element of Louis’s empire stretched into the Congo, transporting unprocessed copper from Katanga through Zambia, from Lubumbashi to Zimbabwe and South Africa to Durban through his transport business, TransGlobal – a name which was neither catchy nor geographically correct.
‘We used to go through Mozambique to Beira, but the route was fucked and it’s quicker to get to Durban,’ Louis lectured Viktor on the morning of the third day, delivering a jug of coffee to his table as he spoke on the basics of Southern African political economy.
‘It sounds to me like colonial exploitation – unprocessed raw material exported for processing in the North,’ Viktor commented, his tone matter-of-fact, conceding nothing to his host.
‘If you mean China, you’re right. The ships head straight to China.’ Louis displayed no offence at Viktor’s comment. He saw the statement as a fact.
‘Don’t you think that your business is a parasite on the continent’s inability to process its own resources and develop itself? Aren’t you selling off the continent?’ Viktor said, his voice flat and unanimated.
‘These monkeys couldn’t develop a community of grass huts, let alone a continent. I run businesses that give some of them work.’ Louis was stout, heavily built. His arms and shoulders moved quickly, as if he mined the unprocessed copper in Katanga himself. He paced the kitchen, his steps hard and deliberate, his sure, confident footing breaking open the earth, claiming the continent. He hoisted himself onto one of the granite work surfaces opposite the table where Viktor cradled his coffee.
‘They are not monkeys, and I find it offensive that you use that word,’ Viktor said.
‘Kaffirs, then.’
‘No, not kaffirs. Fellow human beings.’
‘Primitives,’ Louis said, crossing his legs. ‘Are you happy with primitives?’
‘Your attitude is primitive.’ The man – this primitive – relishes contradiction, Viktor thought.
‘You’ll see.’
‘Yes, I do see. A racist businessman making money exploiting people, communities and countries he labels primitive. If you keep calling human beings animals, you will probably be shot like one.’ Viktor put his coffee cup down and stood.
Louis laughed, jumped down from the counter and shook Viktor’s shoulder vigorously. ‘I like you. I like you. Very funny! Shot like an animal. Great.’ The more Viktor disagreed with this man, this white tsunami of Southern Africa, the closer Louis seemed to be drawn in.
Louis’s other business interest, the Zimbabwe branch of his empire, was a café, Kappas Coffee, in central Harare. ‘The best coffee in Southern Africa, Viktor. Come by and I’ll feed you. Coffee beans grown on my own estate near Mutare, in the Eastern Highlands, where they are also processed. Processed, dried, crushed, bagged, exported. Do you hear that, Viktor? Processed!’
*
After more procrastination, finally Anne-Marie had resolved to tell Nelson that she wanted a break. Coming from work, she wore her black heels and a suit with a pencil skirt to the meeting. As she entered the block of flats, almost surprised she recalled that tonight Viktor was going to be at the meeting. And what then? What had their friendship, their connection, actually meant to her? How real was it? Was it possible that Viktor believed that their virtual romance – the heated, absurd things they had said to each other in text messages, on Facebook – represented a real relationship?
Anne-Marie stood still. She held onto the handrail that led to the stairwell and let
her thoughts go so that she could hear the meeting upstairs, the secret, implausible gathering of grown men and women who took on false names, so incomplete in their disguise, and gathered for noisy weekly discussions. After a moment she corralled her thoughts again, chased away the distractions, found the way back to herself. He is so lost in his virtual world, so utterly absorbed in it, that he actually thinks we are having a relationship, and now he has come to Zimbabwe to see me. A black fantasy, an African adventure. Anne-Marie tried to stop herself from thinking harder on the point, because she knew where it would lead. Involuntarily she felt her chest heave with shame at the thought of the messages, the photos she’d sent, the cravings she’d had for him. Had she driven all of her loneliness, Nelson’s neglect of her, the fucking heartache of Zimbabwe onto safe, remote Viktor? She wondered if her need for him was really hunger for Nelson – the man she wanted but couldn’t have.
‘Damn it,’ she said aloud, her hand gripping the rail hard, ‘I’m doing that thing again, that bloody overthinking. It doesn’t get me anywhere, only takes me round and round.’
Would he even turn up? They had communicated a week ago. Viktor had said that he was arriving on Thursday, that he had been in touch with Nelson and would be at the weekly meeting of the Harare Central branch of the Society of Liberated Minds. He had told Nelson and Biko that he was coming. Tendai tells me I have to see for myself and that my learning counts for nothing. I NEED TO SEE (his emphasis). So I am coming to Zimbabwe to report on the crisis for Mutations.
After Viktor’s first text, Anne-Marie had not responded. She wanted her silence to tell him not to expect anything; if action was what he needed, then he had to know that it was governed by laws separate to the unreal digital jurisdiction they’d briefly inhabited. She wanted to say that all those intense, meaningful exchanges – the snatched calls, the messages, the sexting, the make-believe fucking – they’d done in the ether, had meant nothing in the stakes of real life. But she couldn’t say this, because it had meant something to her – she too had needed the feelings, the desire, the mystery.