An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  ‘Sorrow?’ Anne-Marie repeated, and laughed again.

  ‘My real action and commitment are my tears, I suppose. Paralysing bloody pity.’

  ‘Well, Zimbabwe doesn’t need your pity.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And, I suspect, neither does your daughter.’

  ‘Rosa.’

  ‘Does Rosa need your pity?’

  Viktor felt suddenly exposed and ridiculous. Perhaps he would ruin Harare as well, pollute it with his guilt, his depressive anaclitic disorder, his battle for balance on the tightrope of existence. They arrived at Anne-Marie’s flat.

  As Viktor washed off the day in the bathroom, tipping cold water over his shoulders, Anne-Marie moved furtively around the flat, closing the curtains – on the windows that had them – and turning off the lights. Does he even find me attractive? She saw his awkwardness at the meeting, his hesitation when she offered him accommodation, as evidence that he was disappointed in her body, in her real-life curves and imperfections. As she moved around the flat, trying to tidy up, she grew irritated with him, with the situation that had thrust him on her. He hadn’t even asked if he could come. He had given her no notice, no time to have tried to lose ten pounds before his arrival. She stared towards the bathroom door and muttered, irritated with herself and her guest, something a Facebook friend had said to her once: Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

  In the preamble of doubt and nervousness, stilted, stiff, they moved around Anne-Marie’s flat as she prepared their night, arranging the bed, the sheets, the pillows. Viktor kept himself apart, constantly moving his bag to different places in the flat – beside the sofa, to the corridor, the hall by the front door.

  Eventually, tired, wondering how she was going to do this, Anne-Marie stood in the hall, her hands on her hips. Viktor stood by the entrance to the kitchen, his T-shirt crooked on his shoulders, feet splayed on the floor like flippers, holding his bag by its torn handles.

  ‘Come here, Viktor,’ Anne-Marie ordered softly.

  Viktor moved slowly towards her.

  ‘Can you just drop the bag, please? You’re staying, right?’

  Viktor stopped a foot away from Anne-Marie, bent, dropped the bag between them.

  ‘Come here, I said.’

  Stiffly Viktor shuffled forward a few more inches.

  Anne-Marie reached up, put her hands on each side of his face and smiled. Viktor could smell her skin, the dying perfume, the day, the film of sweat on her hands – he wanted more, to feel her damp warmth over him, to taste her. Still he didn’t move. He avoided her eyes. He stared at the floor.

  ‘Here,’ Anne-Marie said again, pulling his face towards her, forcing him to bend. He lifted his eyes to her.

  Viktor felt an overwhelming flood, a rush of everything. Images came for him, surrounded him – of his life, his people, their exhausting, intolerable love, their claims on him, his on them. Before his lips reached Anne-Marie he saw his daughter – her arms around his neck, her long, combed, black hair, the want on her face that he’d never understood – he saw Nina, too, a terrible questioning around her eyes as she stared at him. He felt his chest hollow, lurch up and a deep feeling of desire and regret.

  Yet the kiss and embrace was as passionate as he had ever known. Their tongues quickly found each other and moved together. His kiss told her that at last she had his full attention; they were both desperately in need of someone to give them life and hope.

  Anne-Marie put her hand under his stretched, faded T-shirt and laid her fingers on the base of his neck. Viktor copied her, pulled away her blouse and slowly moved his hand up her chest, resting his hot palm between her breasts. She groaned.

  Anne-Marie took his hand and led him into her room. Viktor immediately reached for the light switch and turned it off. ‘Turn it back on,’ Anne-Marie said. She lay on the bed, strewn with clothes and unmade, swirling sheets. Slowly she started to unbutton her blouse, instructing Viktor to lie next to her. Propped up on her pillows, she peeled the blouse open and wriggled further up the bed. ‘Take my bra off. Reach round my back and unclip it.’ Viktor leant in, his breathing short, uneven, and coiled his hands behind her, fumbled, undid the bra. She breathed heavily on his neck.

  Her nipples were hard. Viktor kissed them, taking each one in his mouth and lightly running his tongue around them. Holding his head, Anne-Marie moved it in the way she wanted his tongue to move.

  Briefly Viktor felt his thoughts drift, his concentration dip. He wondered if this was the problem – that our modern consciousness could only be satisfied by the thrill and ecstasies of sex, that there was no human experience to rival its climax and destruction. Quickly he was brought back by her fingers running lightly along his spine, and the thought scattered before it could take further root.

  Their breathing had become deep, synchronised. Anne-Marie’s skin puckered with moisture. She moaned each time he moved his hands and sighed in a different note for each part of her back, her legs, her neck. Viktor ran his hands, dragging his fingertips along her skin, and he fancied that she sang.

  ‘Help me with this, Viktor.’ Gently she pushed his head away from her. She unzipped the tight skirt and Viktor pulled her panties down with it – lace, he noted, as though she’d planned for him to see them. Her pubic hair was thick and dense.

  Viktor stood awkwardly beside the bed, fumbling as he undid his trousers and levered his shoes off. He knelt again on the bed and ran his hands along the inside of Anne-Marie’s thighs. She sighed and let her head fall back. Quickly he sank his face between her legs and breathed in to get her whole scent. He sucked in her smell, filled himself with her.

  Her thighs were dark even against her dark complexion. Timidly Viktor kissed them, working his way up, listening to her breathing. When he took a first tentative lick she gasped and writhed, placed her hands across her breasts, breathed in deeply.

  Viktor felt the pulse in his head beat heavily, his erection pressing into the bed. Instinctively he tried to think, to reason, to find an analysis, and began to raise himself on his elbows, but Anne-Marie interrupted. ‘Come back here.’ She held out her hand and drew him closer, positioning him again between her legs.

  He moved the tip of his tongue inside her, around her, exploring, and she trembled. Such subtlety and care, Anne-Marie thought, he is painting me with his tongue. Still, thoughts crowded in: Nelson’s face, his ironic smile, the meeting, his Lenin pose, one hand on his hip, another pointing into the room – his million-strong movement of thirty people. Then her mother’s face, stern, disapproving, telling her to come back to Kinshasa, work with her, live in the family house. Viktor craned his head, looked up and tried to find her face. He reached for her hand, knotting his fingers into hers.

  After a few minutes she said, ‘Stop.’ Viktor raised himself again and looked into her eyes. ‘This is like breathing to me,’ Anne-Marie said. ‘Do you understand?’

  Unwilling to break his silence, to ruin the moment with his words, Viktor nodded.

  ‘Lie down next to me.’ Anne-Marie patted the space beside her.

  Viktor moved to her side and pressed himself to her. He felt himself falling. Only the bed existed, nothing but the bed, raised on its tall legs, thrusting them into the night, into the dark sky, the noise and clutter a faint, invisible chatter beneath them. Above them, the moon. He felt the smooth skin of her back against his chest, her buttocks pressing into his groin. He wrapped an arm around her, held her breasts, kissed her neck. They were lost. Between them there was an anarchy of passion, an uncontrolled ache of desire that flowed quickly in their veins.

  Afterwards, unable to stop kissing and touching each other, they gradually fell into a deep, temporary sleep in each other’s arms. Even when they woke, the rawness, the daily fatigue, the cynicism that had been inside both of them was gone. They felt nothing but the momentary, pure echo of their lovemaking.

  In the conversation that followed their nap, as they talked long into the night, Anne
-Marie thought about Nelson. Viktor was able to talk to her about his dilemmas and even his failings with an intimacy and vulnerability she had not experienced. Strangely, she thought, it made her feel as though she was forgiven for her own faults and failings. Somehow she had always put up a front of femininity and, with Nelson, a pretence of being an Iron Lenin. An Iron Lumumba. Nelson wanted a faultless woman and a militant revolutionary. Already, with Viktor, she experienced a sense of solidarity with a lover – something she had never known.

  Without exactly knowing what she was doing, she found herself questioning him, testing him. Was there a place in his life for her, and in her own for him? Was there a future for this? For Anne-Marie there was the instinctive, innocent question: Could we be together? This was followed by the learnt one – self-protection and political formulation – Should I even care if we can? Would that stop me from feeling what I feel and doing what we are doing? Yet she knew that for her to break through the doubt and questioning, the ingrained cynicism, she would have to disown these ideas – to clear herself down to zero. Somehow these elaborate processes of thought had to be unlearnt in her as well.

  The line always had to have its place. Political rules, formulations, theory had taught her to close herself up and, in her own way, to keep life at bay. But in the innocence of their connection Anne-Marie felt unprepared by her training, hampered by all of her experience and learning. She may have appeared to Viktor as wonderfully liberated and sexual, but for all her bombast and confidence, she realised, she too needed to bubble out of herself. To become unprepared, untutored. Both of them were too practised at life, too imbued with ideas, they didn’t really know how to live.

  They were faintly aware, as they lay awake, propped up on their pillows, the sweat of their love sealing their backs to the sheets – their minds emptying, unable to entirely refill and clutter – that this first intense, meaningful, playful night together had started something.

  Viktor felt his mind attempt to turn on its familiar axis, casting about for a reference, a book, a guide – did Hegel have anything to say about this? Was there a companion for these sensations in Žižek? In Baudrillard, maybe; something about the simulacra and simulation? He felt a faint nagging – surely he needed to find the text for this experience?

  He caught himself. With different degrees of severity, these encumbrances of thought were killing them. Tonight it seemed that, for the first time in years, they were really living.

  *

  Comrade!

  I know you have arrived by now and are immersed already in the sea of action and life that is Zimbabwe. I am writing in a rush to tell you that everything is changing: all long-stagnating rustiness, flabbiness, habit-based, outdated political priorities, emphases, tactics and old ‘formulae learnt by rote so mindlessly repeated by those regrettable old comrades in the North’ – as Nelson recently put it in an email to me, is falling away. But in the newly awakening minority epitomised by the struggle at the university we have found a new spirit to forge the future.

  Now everyone can see the forces active in this ongoing red-hot molten lava of the African-Arab Revolutions, where the locomotive driving force of the working poor is plainly evident to anyone who can watch a YouTube video (yes, comrade, on your urging I am finally watching YouTube).

  And certainly MOST – I would say ALL – activists I’ve read have FAILED the acid test of the reality of revolution. I have read your posts on Mutations, Refutations, whatever you call that bloody thing, and I saw the article you republished from the Society of Liberated Minds (the organisation that made me what I am today). But I am worried - they seem to have inserted a paragraph into a young Tunisian socialist’s account of his involvement in the revolution, stating that ‘the trade union federation started and led the Tunisian revolution’.

  As Nelson often repeats, ‘Facts are stubborn things’. My Botswanan partner, who has come back to me, and has now moved into my small room, has watched innumerable phone videos from the Tunisian workers who uploaded them AS THEY MADE THE REVOLUTION: first in Sidi-Bouzid, then Sulyam, then Kazzarin, the first big industrial town, where the State tried to kill it dead with a massacre (48 shot dead in the head), then to the south, the west, and then north, taking in every town – to Tunis. And it’s damn obvious from the videos, that it is groups of young, sometimes older workers running to the next town to spread it – phoning ahead, getting gatherings together. This process went on all through December, unifying FOURTEEN towns and cities, before the union federation called a ‘token Symbolic Strike of two hours’. This can in no way be characterised as either ‘STARTING’ or ‘LEADING’ anything, let alone ‘the Tunisian Revolution’. TELL NELSON THIS.

  Sala kakuhle Viktor!

  Tendai

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Harare was perched with uncertainty on the red earth, its sprawling bungalow belt and high-density slums ringing the distinctive, shimmering skyscrapers in the downtown streets and avenues. The economic meltdown, the plunge, had thrown this thinly rooted city to the ground. In the middle of roads and on pavements, like a thousand mouths speaking, potholes opened and craters appeared. It seemed that the ground was absorbing this brick and concrete metropolis, this interloper, pulling up the shallow foundations of the city. The red earth broke through the tarmac, upturned paving stones, ploughing the city into a field. Moving around Harare now required ingenuity, daring and a hard heart. The city was being expunged in a slow, tragic urban earthquake, all human plans and designs swallowed up, the borrowed and desecrated land retaken. Harare showed Zimbabwe the way.

  Yet it was not the city’s demise but its opulence that puzzled Viktor. As a child he had counted the miniature figures surrounding a half-built pyramid in a picture book and wondered how this society could have survived so long, building tombs to a family tyranny for a millennium. Now he asked, with the same innocence, how the city’s wealth had not been expropriated, its high rises not occupied or levelled to the ground. How had the poor let this go on for so long?

  If the urban space had been prised open, the skyscrapers reclaimed by the earth, then the human sojourners were also brought low. ‘People in rags don’t make revolutions,’ Primo Levi said. So why did his comrades point to the undone, the life-drained rabble moving around the city, as the force to unseat Mugabe and refigure Zimbabwe? Harare’s human mass had been dispersed. Where once there had been unions recruiting and organising in the city’s celebrated industrial areas of Southerton and Workington, now the factories, bottling plants, clothing depots, industrial outlets, were hollowed-out hangars squatted by human jetsam. Where was the class ready to shake off its chains and fight? Instead the residents were left desolate and alone. There was a silence to the city as people waited for free lifts on pavement corners, hung limp hands into the road, queued speechless for combis and walked in single file over miles and miles along roads and highways to townships – Highfield, Zuwadzana – the colour and will washed from their faces.

  ‘We are in a city of the living dead,’ Nelson remarked, laughing coldly.

  Through the full range of biblical catastrophe – flood, plague, poverty, dictatorship – the Society of Liberated Minds never failed to organise its weekly meetings. A week after Viktor’s first meeting, there was another.

  When the speech had finished there was the routine of arm-raising: fists out, some raised, unclenched hands, others waiting until the last chant to punch the air. Viktor was no longer unknown or considered only with curiosity. This was the closest Viktor got to being accepted, to being more than a white man, a murungu and foreigner: he looked like them, like Stalin and Lenin, like a Zimbabwean socialist, with his single pair of grey trainers, size thirteen, with the hole for his big toe on his right foot, the bare long toe protruding, the holes in his jeans, the elbows gone from his sweatshirt.

  Nelson beckoned to Viktor from the windowsill. The window was open and the hazy, speckled dusk danced on the parked cars one floor down. The men smoked, drawing hard
on their cigarettes, blowing the smoke in the direction of the window. ‘You need to listen to this, Viktor,’ Nelson said, and laid his arm across Viktor’s back.

  Stalin was speaking. ‘Mandela. Mandela. Gone are the days when we have to worship him. You have to remember, comrades,’ he looked at his small audience, cigarette in cupped hand, ‘we thought the release of Mandela was going to add to the bloodshed and revolution and that liberation was going to come. But, man, he was so peaceful that he calmed us down, told us to put our spears down, to settle in peace and liberate peacefully, that’s what Mandela taught us.’

  Lenin was nodding his head furiously. ‘Even us, here in Zim, thought Mugabe was right, but he told us that fighting with guns and explosives would fail.’

  Stalin interrupted. ‘Yeah, that the buildings would come apart and then we’d only have to rebuild them! But we all thought that when Mandela was released – and we fought for his release – that he was going to make a difference. Look at South Africa today, look at white people.’

  ‘Come on, you guys, don’t just give me the standard black nationalist bullshit,’ Nelson said, his arm still draped across Viktor’s back. He squeezed Viktor’s shoulder and turned towards him. ‘We’ve got to make our white guest feel welcome.’

  Viktor bristled. ‘Don’t moderate on my behalf.’ He felt Nelson’s breath on his neck, the smell of his smoky, moist mouth.

  ‘Esssh, man,’ Stalin said, his wrinkled, scarred face raised in a smile. ‘But I still feel those white individuals are separating the nation.’

  Lenin struggled to return the conversation to its previous theme. ‘In South Africa and Zimbabwe we were fooled. In South Africa Mandela told you to hang up your spear, that he was going to liberate you with this settlement thing, all that rubbish, reconciliation, peace, the TRC.’