by Zeilig, Leo;
On the same day, two hours after his last text, Viktor had sent a final message: And I am coming to see you as well, mudiwa.
Before she climbed the stairs, to ground herself and find her beautiful insignificance, Anne-Marie looked up at the open and generous night sky, almost always clear in Harare – strange how a city sky can be so wide, how it can show the stars so clearly amid the sound of the country’s poverty and traffic. She fancied she could see the entire universe. A warm breeze wrapped itself around her, but still she felt her skin prickle. Tonight she wasn’t satisfied even by the universe. Next to the bed in her flat lay the book, The Physics of Nothing, spread-eagled on the floor, a gift from a friend in South Africa. Anne-Marie started to climb the stairs, reluctant to reach the top before she could answer her own question. And what of dark matter? We know only 5 per cent of the total energy density of the universe, but what of the 95 per cent we do not understand? What of the all-encompassing darkness?
‘Damn it,’ she said aloud as she reached the top step. The truth was that she hadn’t really understood what she’d been reading the night before, and now she had the meeting. Insignificant and ignorant. ‘And what about Viktor?’ she asked herself again.
*
Viktor unfolded the address, held it under the dim yellow light inside the car and read it to the driver. ‘You can walk. It’s only five minutes through Harare Gardens and straight up.’
‘I don’t want to walk. Can you take me?’
‘I haven’t got any fuel.’ The driver coughed into his hand, catching the phlegm in his hand and wiping himself clean on his trousers. He was old and his face was creased like tissue paper.
‘Can you get some?’
Louis had offered Viktor his car and a driver, if he was determined to contact these people and work on this ridiculous website. ‘If these fucking blacks want to kill themselves, let them. Mugabe won’t hesitate. He’s a tough, mean bastard. Stay here. Stay with us.’
‘Give me some cash and I’ll fill up.’
Without looking at his passenger, the driver – his eyes fixed ahead on the cracked windscreen – fought with the gears, grinding the stick into place. The car shook and lurched into the road.
Viktor pushed the seat back, his legs still bent against the dashboard. The bag he had carried onto the plane rested on his lap. Books, pamphlets, the educational materials he had been instructed to bring. The email lay printed and unfolded on his bag, listing exactly what to buy, in what quantities and where to find the group. The bag was open on Viktor’s lap. It couldn’t close, the thousand jagged teeth of the zip splayed into a cloth smile. It had never worked. Isaac had given it to him when he was a boy; Isaac had used the bag when he was a boy. Viktor rubbed the bag with his hand. The faded red material felt strong, firm like a confirmation of life. At the end of life the only thing left in the universe would be Isaac’s old school bag. Viktor gripped it tightly.
He felt the flood of doubt course through his body again. He tried to imagine the meeting, but he couldn’t. When he thought about Anne-Marie, drew up images of her, the laconic texts, the heated messages, he felt his pulse thud heavily in his neck. He needed this rush, the certainty of her that he felt in his chest, in his coiled gut. Even the clarity of his feelings for Anne-Marie was fraught with uncertainty. Viktor felt the springs of the worn car seat pressing, nagging under him, and he adjusted his position. He told himself that he was here for Zimbabwe, not Anne-Marie; he was following Tendai’s advice and seeing life for himself.
Finally the car slowed, jerked out of gear, hit the high kerb and stalled. Viktor said nothing, handed the driver a ten-dollar note and hauled his bag out of the car.
*
The low-rise blocks of red-brick flats were on the corner of Fourth Street and Josiah Tongogara, with a high perimeter fence ringed with barbed wire. The gate was operated by a security guard who covered the day shift from a wooden footstool under a golf umbrella. When a car turned off the road he would stand, grip the rolling gate and drag it open along its iron track. As the car drove through he would tip his cap, revealing a mass of black and white hair. In the evening the night watchman arrived and pulled on the uniform he shared with his colleague, both men changing in the dying light behind the umbrella by the gate. When the nights were cold the night watchman would huddle, his legs and arms pulled tight against him, catching interrupted sleep between gate duties.
Flat Four, Calder Gardens, was on the first floor, behind the walkway that ran the entire length of each floor, linking the flats to each other and to the stairwells and communal balconies. The swept and polished concrete, the car park full of twin-cabs, jeeps and family cars, belied the crisis. The block, like the neighbourhood, was part of what was known and still spoken of with hushed awe, as the Avenues – a middle-class, inner-city community of large blocks of well-built flats, lavish housing complexes that snaked north from the city centre. From Calder Gardens it was a ten-minute walk downtown. There were swimming pools and intercoms. The small open-air shopping malls boasted expensive, fully stocked supermarkets, even a delicatessen with imported hummus, anchovies, olives and salami. Until recently there had been a theatre and bookshop, but deep into the crisis these had dared to sell books critical of the regime and stage plays that savaged the dictatorship with flimsy metaphors. The tree-lined Avenues had a strip of private clinics, dentists and a small hospital.
Yet even this area, with its boutique hotels and constantly budding array of flowers, jacaranda trees, bougainvillea, gumtrees, palms in continual bloom, was bursting apart. The roadway was cracked, the pavement strewn with vegetables and fruits lined up in rows on sheets of flattened boxes, the sun scorching and ripening the produce. One large open-air mall, once a haven of liberal, independent Zimbabwe and the decade-long flush of optimism after 1980, was circled day and night by groups of unemployed men, students and township youth who begged, stole and threatened the shoppers, who drove with the windows up and the doors locked.
The flat was the temporary headquarters of the Society for Liberated Minds, where the organisation’s printing press, reams of paper, books, library and pamphlets were stored. Once a week the front room, behind the kitchen, was lined with plastic chairs, a table placed in front of the window, the banners and posters of the movement stuck to the surrounding walls, and the room would fill with students from the university, unemployed workers and the township poor. These were activists, each in their own group: the Zimbabwe National Student Union, the Patient Action Campaign, or trade unionists, sacked printers and clothing workers still active in their hollowed-out organisations.
Nelson lay on the uncovered foam mattress, aware that he would soon have to clear the room of his books and the bed and prepare for the meeting. The students, his students from the law department, had recently shut down the university, arguing and bullying other faculties to come out. The Society for Liberated Minds had members in the Zimbabwe National Student Union, a body that was not what it had been. Nelson – when every other lecturer had turned politician – was hated with a certain respect by the regime. His battered Toyota Corolla, the blue metallic paint chipped and scratched, was always full of students, riding low, the wheel arches almost scuffing the tyres, on his slow journey up Fourth Street to Mount Pleasant and the university for morning classes and again in the evening, when he stopped at the teeming bus stops, leant across the passenger seat and shouted, ‘Ndiri kuenda kuma Avenues, pane anoda kuenda here.’ (‘I’m going to the Avenues.’)
Students, men and women, elbowed and rushed to get in. The fitful tape deck played the same tape, struggle songs from the seventies. Nelson kept rewinding the same song:
Nora Nora kani Nora Vakomana
Mhururu kuenda nekudzoka vakomana
Nora Vakomana.
His eyes would fill with water and he would tighten his grip on the steering wheel. He drove slowly so he could proselytise, elaborate on an argument to his captive audience, win them to a proper meeting, not this ambulatin
g, cramped discussion: the raised voices of his hitchhikers, his own loud, tuneful oration competing with ‘Nora’, the distorted, loud, slurring words of Elliot Manyika.
‘No, no, listen comrades, these bourgeois nationalist fuckers are on the move. What’s your view on this, comrades?’ Before anyone could answer he’d continue, ‘For me it raises the bells of Mugabe in 1997 to 2002, but in the context of Egypt, Tunisia, the Occupy movement, Greece, Brazil, Turkey. See what’s happening in South Africa – these are Mugabe’s real regional and continental disciples and heirs, but they may go further than Mugabe and potentially unite, radicalising sections of the rural and urban poor ... Comrades, don’t you see, don’t you? Comrades, our side has to move!
‘Our hard and painful experiences here in Zimbabwe show the absolutely critical need of a sizable pole of the revolutionary left – but one concretely rooted in the key centres of the emerging struggles, one equally rooted in an internationalist perspective.’
Then straining, slowing the car, pounding the steering wheel to the music, to the sound of his own words, ‘That’s what we are trying to do in the Society of Liberated Minds. Egypt shows that the world has entered into an unprecedented period of revolutionary upheavals which will dwarf any that have occurred in human history. I mean, I mean’ – Nelson lost his breath – ‘I mean, seventeen million people on the streets of Egypt! Comrades, we must be ready.’
*
Nelson gave the impression of assembling his talks as he delivered them, handling a bundle of newspaper clippings, a pile of books open at a certain page. Long pauses just as the small, intimate audience crowded into his flat, expecting to feel the satisfaction of an argument consummated, a dramatic, damning denunciation reaching its climax. Instead Nelson tantalised the audience, stopped mid-flow when he thought the room had been comforted by his analysis, intentionally stuttered over a word and with a series of apologies, continued. ‘Sorry, comrades, I can’t find the quote I am looking for,’ as he spread the papers across the table, his fingers outstretched, covering the tabletop with print as if sealing the gaps. Nelson fought against satisfaction and catharsis; instead he urged complexity in the battle for organisational and ideological lucidity.
Viktor stumbled across the car park to the stairway, pulled forward by the weight of the bag. Slowly he dragged himself up the flight of stairs to the first floor. He found the flat and knocked timidly, then eased the door open. Nelson was speaking when he entered, holding his glasses in his hand, stabbing the air with the other. Anne-Marie turned her head quickly to the door without a flicker of her previous questioning. She smiled and patted the space on the bench next to her as if they had seen each other in the morning and this was natural – as if they knew each other.
‘The problem is that there are some people who are more equal than others in that movement. There are others who are now sitting at the head of the table and deciding how much the others should eat, in particular those who formed the party. So it’s not just a question that involves everyone, it’s a question of whose interests are now being championed by the movement. And our problem was that the interests that were now being championed were not the interests of working people. And mind you, comrades, Y-Party was not formed as a broad movement for everyone. Y-Party was formed after the hosting of what was called a Working People’s Convention in 1999. So I want you to be very clear about this.’
Anne-Marie’s tiny braids, tipped by white, yellow and red beads, hung on her shoulders. She smelt of perfume heated by the day’s perspiration. When Viktor sat down she moved closer to him, so her leg pressed against his. Leaning towards him, she whispered, ‘Good to see you, comrade, what took you?’
Nelson continued: ‘Right from its base, Y-Party was marked with the stamp of workers, the unemployed, the poor and the peasants. And then intellectuals like ourselves in the Society for Liberated Minds, who sympathise and fight for the cause of these people, were also part and parcel. The rich, the white farmers, the business community, only came in after February 2000, and a whole lot of other people moved in ...’
Anne-Marie was irritated with Nelson, his self-conscious tricks and studied pondering, his flirtation with the women and men in the room.
‘So, comrades, sei tisina kuramba tichiita mamovement kusvika tabudirira mazviri? But very soon, we believe that the conditions will be right again for the emergence of a real movement that will take on the Mugabe government and the dictatorship. And we will also take on the bosses and the capitalists of this country and region.’
‘Tell me if you want anything translated.’ Anne-Marie held her hair away from her face and turned to Viktor, speaking softly into his ear.
‘Remember that these businessmen and women came in to hijack this programme. So we remained in the party until 2002, when we were expelled precisely because we wanted to fight them from within. But it is clear to us that after 2002 the party leadership had then been hijacked. And indeed, we have been vindicated up to this day. The elections have again been rigged, and Y-Party still insists on going into that parliament and taking on this thing. If Y-Party had been ready to mobilise its membership and the working people, the urban people, by now Mugabe would be history.’ Nelson paused, staring at the audience.
Anne-Marie leant towards Viktor again. ‘Y-Party refers to the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition.’ Viktor’s ear tickled. The skin on his neck, his arm, the side of his body vibrated with her presence, as though the words were crawling on their own thin, lettered legs.
Viktor longed the meeting on, willed Nelson and his prevarications, his sub-clauses and deviations, to continue to prolong this sensation, the pressure of her thigh against his.
It was this simple, distracted first contact that meant everything to them – because in its strangeness, in the almost-familiarity of it, they both realised something completely astonishing. Their fantasy of contact – on the phone, in text messages, in emails and on Facebook – had been important. It was a fantasy, but beneath the fantasy was a real need for each other – a longing, an ache for the old to finally die and give way. The power of what they now felt was at the utter appropriateness of their first actual meeting and the immediate peculiarity of it.
Nelson seemed to be goading the crowd, who called back to his words, agreed with his thumping anger. Nelson wanted the audience’s detachment rather than their seduction, yet this outcome was, he knew, anything but original.
An old woman, her large waist and buttocks covered in a coiled red and green cloth, stood up and shouted, ‘Jambanja, jambanja now! Ndikamubata chete MUGABE!’
Everyone laughed, took a breath and then went on laughing. Anne-Marie whispered, ‘She says if she ever sees Mugabe in the street, she’ll sit on him.’
Nelson replied, ‘Shinga Mushandi Shinga! Qina Msebenzi Qina! But, sister, we have to sit on the whole of X-Party and Y-Party and then take over State House, the land and the country for ourselves.’
Anne-Marie added, ‘“Shinga Mushandi Shinga” means “As workers you must be courageous”.’
Nelson paused, put his glasses on and looked around the room. He looked at the couple sitting huddled together at the back of the room, and heads turned towards them.
Viktor sat up, feeling guilty, convinced they’d been caught, that he’d broken a basic rule and that this crowd of twenty souls could see right through him, with a vision and intuition he imagined was common in Zimbabwe. The audience, Viktor fancied, could penetrate his translucent body and see all his faults and failings: My relationship with my parents, my daughter, my habits, my money problems, my prejudices, my writing, my height, my hair. Despite their large, open smiles and welcoming, lifted eyebrows, they could see that he was a fake, that he did not bear the stamp of a worker, that he was not unemployed or poor.
He felt himself filling up with misunderstandings. Could Anne-Marie also see everything, peering as she was into his ear, into his brutal, raw, ridiculous soul?
Nelson addressed the room, stari
ng over his glasses, his hands moving over his notes as though transmitting the text to his brain from his fingertips. ‘We have a comrade from the UK who has joined us to help us make our way through the next few months.’
Anne-Marie elbowed Viktor.
Then, staring at Viktor, Nelson spoke loudly in Shona.
Anne-Marie translated, ‘He is welcoming you. Saying that you’ve come from the UK to participate in the next phase of struggle in Southern Africa. He says you’re going to speak to the meeting.’
‘When?’ Viktor asked, alarmed.
‘Now,’ she said.
*
After Viktor had introduced himself awkwardly, stuttered, thanked the room for allowing him to come and then, apologising, sat down quickly, Nelson dropped his glasses on the table, cleared his throat. ‘It is normal that we finish our meetings by singing “The Internationale”, first in English and then Shona.’
Chairs scratched against the concrete floor as people stood. Anne-Marie folded her legs, clicked her tongue and didn’t move. She leant over to Viktor, resting a hand on his knee, and hissed loudly, ‘You don’t have to sing. I think it’s ridiculous. You know ZANU-PF have the same ritual in their meetings? Only not “The Internationale” any more, but recordings of comrade Elliot Manyika singing struggle songs from the guerrilla war.’
A few heads turned to the couple. Nelson led the choir, almost shouting, ‘Oh ye prisoners of want ...’ Viktor sat nervously, worried that he was offending his hosts to keep this woman company.
Nelson was right; the movement had been stolen, their party hijacked by the NGOs and the middle class. Away from the city centre, Harare’s roads and alleyways flowed with sewage; the people dressed in old, dirty, torn clothes; yet this, Viktor was told, was new. Twenty years old or less. There had always been poverty in Zimbabwe – hunger, droughts, early and plentiful death, short lives snuffed away by simple sickness – but this urban decay, this despair across every township from Highfield to Chitungwiza, these living corpses in rags and bare feet, was new. For a brief moment there had been hope, Nelson had said: jobs in agriculture, schooling and work in the city’s factories or in government offices. Now the country was hollowed, its bones emptied of marrow, the skeleton frame ready to crumble. Nelson had seen the streets crack and rupture like a ploughed field. NGOs had set up in commandeered compounds, in suburban houses abandoned by their white owners in the suburbs. Fleets of Land Rovers travelled to islands of stocked shops, delicatessens, video stores, florists – goddamn flower shops to service the community of expats, the wealthy elite. All making their way comfortably on the racket, the collapse. And the opposition, like the regime, had grown – as Nelson had said – ‘fat and thick’ on their MP salaries and handouts, while the poor had been abandoned just when they had started to take charge.