An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Nelson added, for Viktor’s benefit, ‘The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, to bring healing and amnesty for apartheid killers.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Viktor said, irritated, wanting Lenin to continue.

  ‘So all that healing nonsense, the TRC, was a puppet structure,’ Lenin resumed. ‘In 1980 in Zimbabwe, Mugabe did the same thing. “Love your enemy, put away your guns, end the revolution”.’

  Nelson nudged Viktor and muttered, ‘Listen, listen.’

  ‘I am listening,’ Viktor said, annoyed.

  ‘So,’ Stalin said, taking up the story again, ‘we feel oppressed and our hearts are bleeding inside. My people find themselves in a very confusing situation. There are these barriers, Mandela’s barriers, and we are trying to find a way through.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Lenin exclaimed.

  ‘Exactly,’ Nelson said. He played with his cigarette, brought the rolled tobacco to his lips and drew in deeply.

  Almost to himself, leaning against the window pane, Stalin spoke in a hushed voice. ‘The fight came to an end and our people had died. A lot of comrades were killed. The day I had to vote in 1994, I never slept. I thought I would get my freedom. Move into a proper house.’

  Nelson interrupted. ‘Tell Viktor, com, about what happened to your mum.’

  Stalin got excited. He took the cigarette packet, rattled a single cigarette free, brought it to his mouth then repeated the action, offering the exposed cigarettes to Viktor, Nelson and Lenin.

  ‘Okay, comrade,’ Stalin continued. ‘We were the fighting units inside South Africa, in the townships and squatter camps. We brought apartheid to its knees. We took over the bush with our shacks and these areas became no-go areas. We built our shacks by force every time. But when the ANC was unbanned, the comrades from outside, from exile, came back – and then there was trouble. The regional office of the ANC in Johannesburg came to stop us. They told us to disarm but we hated it. We were told to give up our ammunition. The one thing that we hated was for a person to come and disarm us when he didn’t arm us in the first place.’

  The grey dusk had turned black; the room was empty except for the four men standing by the window. The city had felt airless, closed off, all day, the sun shining between storms, the road and pavement steaming. There was a loud crack of thunder and rain started to fall again, heavily, hammering the ground, the cars, the roofs, ricocheting loudly off the gravel.

  ‘Fuck, look at it,’ Stalin said, flicking his cigarette butt out of the window.

  ‘A monkey’s wedding,’ Lenin commented, staring at the window.

  ‘Carry on,’ Nelson urged.

  ‘They wanted the troublemakers gone,’ Stalin said. ‘The ANC wanted us silenced. We were a, a block to their settlement. We were the troublemakers and we didn’t accept them, so they targeted us.’

  ‘What? The ANC? You mean they wanted to remove you?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘No, they wanted to kill us, com,’ Stalin explained, speaking directly to Viktor. ‘They took the decision to target me. I had to be killed. I felt drowsy that day. I was with my mother in her shack, lying down. And outside I heard, “Stalin, Buhle, you are going to eat shit today!” and they started to fire. I shouted to my mother, “Lie down and don’t move.” So they fired. My mother was thinking it was some silly boys that were playing. So she stood up and got hit in her stomach.’ Stalin stopped suddenly. ‘She died.’

  All the men were quiet. Viktor struggled to understand. He wanted to ask Stalin to repeat the story so he could write it down. His hand patted his jacket pocket, feeling for his notebook.

  Lenin put a hand on Stalin’s shoulder.

  ‘You know what the guy said outside?’ Stalin continued. ‘He said, “We finished them.” Jesus, comrades, I feel like I’m going to cry.’

  Nelson, shaking his head, spoke first. ‘Those nationalist bastards. Those fuckers.’

  After a moment Lenin said, ‘Here it was the massacres of terrorists in the eighties. Twenty thousand dead. Mugabe and ZANU spiked our guns. Stole our revolution. But we still thought it would be better with a black man at the table. We were wrong here and there, we were so fucking wrong. Sei tisina kuramba tichiita mamovement kusvika tabudirira mazviri?’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Viktor heard his mother’s voice in his own.

  To the untidy kitchen in the flat he shared with Anne-Marie, he muttered aloud to himself, ‘We just need to tidy the surfaces, organise the cupboards and then we’ll be able to think clearly.’ These long, lamenting complaints about cleanliness he had learnt from his mother’s desire to organise the world, sweep it into order, arrange it into lines.

  On their fifth day together, Viktor, the lover-lodger, had reordered the flat. He hooked up improvised curtains, wiped away the layer of dirt lining the skirting boards, dusted the lampshades, removed the black dust ringing every frame: the photos, the glass-covered, clip-framed map, the picture of the rosy-cheeked cherubs flying over a bowl of bloated fruit. The essence of each object in Anne-Marie’s flat was the mark of dirt: proof of her liberation from domesticity, her refusal to clean the flat or, more significantly in Southern Africa, to get anyone to do it for her. Her escape from the master-slave dialectic.

  Anne-Marie swung open the door to the wardrobe. Viktor was already in bed. ‘What have you done?’ She pointed to her folded panties, the ironed trousers, the shirts hanging neatly on new hangers.

  ‘What?’ Viktor answered.

  ‘You have tidied my clothes. You had no right. I don’t like my clothes folded or the flat so clean. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘There was a dirty black layer of dirt over everything.’

  ‘Dirty black, did you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then wash your mouth out with soap. Mon Dieu, do not use the words black and dirty together.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t a white layer of dirt.’

  ‘What is dirt, anyway? Material in the wrong place – it is colour-blind.’

  ‘I won’t use the word black.’ Viktor felt offended. He had wanted to surprise her, to show her the small joys of swept floors, dusted lampshades; the order of twinned socks, folded skirts, pressed trousers – to thank her with cleaning.

  ‘So not black, okay, just dirt. Just dirt, Viktor, no colour. Let’s get this right – not blackmail, black economy, black sheep or in the black, as you say. Or Black Africa.’ Anne-Marie spoke with a faint, teasing smile.

  ‘Okay,’ Viktor said, pulling the sheet to his chin.

  ‘And don’t clean my flat or my clothes.’

  ‘But two years of dust is black,’ Viktor protested.

  ‘Neither black nor white,’ Anne-Marie retorted.

  It had taken Rosa months to learn how to wield her hands, submit her body to her sovereignty: lifting them with effort, dropping them on an object, coiling her fingers, then lifting them again. Viktor felt as though his mother had entered him, in his words and acts, her hands, aching and stumbling, the skin discoloured and thin, commanding his.

  The fight to empty the flat of dirt, to cleanse the system of mistakes and find the route home – back to where Viktor started, to identify the spot on the map where it went wrong, when he had been carried away from the people he loved. So many mistakes, so little time to correct them. Nothing helped. I will scrub Anne-Marie’s pots and pans tomorrow, the cupboards above the sink. I will finish cleaning the flat, wipe down the surfaces, mop the floor.

  *

  There is that surge, a da, da, hmm, hmm, and then the charge, the thrusting violins like a dance, all tiptoes, across the whole floor, until the cellos, a whole roomful, exclaim and the steps are loud, full, hearty and declaratory and the room is no more. Instead it is an entire life, immense, every particle, each living thing proclaimed. Then the wooden floor, creaking to each step, gives way, bursts, sending shards of wood flying. The orchestra, the audience, with each new mounting, rippling note, breaks into the clear blue sunlight. The mist covering th
e land, hovering over the ground, uncertain what to do, is now forced by the music to disperse and leave the world to song. With tears in their eyes, children sing: ‘Cinque ... dieci.... venti ... trenta ... trentasei ... quarantatre.’

  Viktor sat in the moulded red chair, headphones hugging his ears. The gym where he worked in the morning was full of dirty furniture; behind him was a row of computers. The flatscreen televisions were tuned to sport – rugby, tennis and cricket – the men watching them large, unnatural, genetically modified, with South African dentistry. Viktor ran his tongue over his teeth and found the hole, the spongy gum, the loss. Around him, it seemed, were the same cast of white men and women from the TV, built like the modern continent, human flesh carved in perfect angles, their legs falling straight, the feet arched correctly, the square, accurate shoulders and faces, noses, mouths, ears formed with no allowance for humanity or individuality. It was the cast of settler, etched with the same rigour and inhumanity as the lines that were drawn across towns, villages and life when their ancestors had divided Africa.

  But what was this capacity to remain stupid after four generations? Viktor asked himself.

  ‘It is the mentality of the settler,’ Nelson had said, his words still ringing in Viktor’s ears. ‘You have to understand the type – have you read Fanon?’ Nelson spun around in his chair, his hair held down by a black beret, the locks hanging over his shoulders. He read the titles, making his way through the volumes until, ‘Here, here. Listen, listen, Viktor.’ He flicked quickly back a few pages and read: ‘“In the colonies, in normal times, that is, in the absence of the war of liberation, there is something of the cowboy and the pioneer even in the intellectual. In a period of crisis, the cowboy pulls out his revolver and his instruments of torture.”’

  ‘Cowboys, adventurers, racists,’ Viktor muttered.

  He studied a man in his sixties, his face wrinkled by the sun, his silver watch setting off his brown all-year, all-over tan, a towel thrown over his shoulder, the newspaper open in his hand and his feet set apart. There was nothing crossed, folded, uncertain about him. Each of his thoughts placed firmly on the certainties of the ground, of his land, his order – he was man as statement and exclamation of colonial settlement.

  Viktor looked down again to his notebook and let the music occupy him again, fill his head, run down his spine until he was taken over by it:

  If you would dance, my little Count,

  I’ll play the tune on my pretty guitar.

  If you will come to my dancing school

  I’ll gladly teach you ...

  Sharpening my skill, and using it,

  playing with this one, playing with that one,

  all of your games I’ll turn inside out.

  If you would dance.

  The gym had arrived in great crates and was assembled by a team sent from Johannesburg. The steel frame, the partition walls, the tiling, the red and white paint, the coffee machine serving soya and decaffeinated lattes, the chairs that cocooned Viktor, the banks of computers and screens, the rows of machines, bikes, treadmills, shoulder, arm and thigh presses, the cupboards to lock up valuables, to leave your brains, character, hope. Even the mould of the pool had arrived on the back of a lorry that spent a week weaving its way from Beitbridge to Bulawayo to Gweru to Harare. The Herald had run a feature on the day the gym was due to open: ‘The Virgin Active state-of-the-art gymnasium is proof of the positive business environment created by the government, uniting the ruling party’s twin ideologies of Marxism and entrepreneurship.’

  Viktor’s head fell again to his page and he read the last sentences he’d written:

  Zimbabwe, like the rest of the continent, is still trying to escape the country’s colonial legacy. Mugabe’s anti-Western polemics indicate a hesitant attempt to build a black bourgeoisie. Whether ZANU’s project of black empowerment and ownership can be seriously developed, or if it is even sincere, remains to be seen.

  Viktor smiled, pleased with his formulation, the way the website had begun to take shape, the confidence his writing had assumed over the last three posts – he felt a momentary rush of excitement. What did it mean? Would his pieces be picked up by a news agency? Would he become the guerrilla journalist everyone spoke of in London, Washington, Paris, translated into French, Spanish, Mandarin? The exposé of white privilege and wealth still thriving across Southern Africa, the finely wrought, nuanced arguments that spared no one, the sparse, startling prose that took on the totality of African social relations and broke down ZANU’s nationalist hegemony, revealed the British government’s meddling with the opposition, the role of landed property, their black puppets? Viktor leant back in his chair, stretched out his arms and breathed in, his own hopes flying free like released sparrows, the unruffled stiff feathers pounding the air, the room as great and beautiful as his own shearing ideas.

  The orchestra caught up with the voices, harmonised:

  Here I am at your feet,

  with my heart is on fire.

  Look around you,

  and remember the betrayer!

  The birds flew higher and higher, reached the sky. Viktor’s own possibilities lifted: a literary prize, a collection of his writings, recognition, celebration. Final proof that it had all been worth it, the sacrifices, the absences, his disappearances, each of his failures absolved by his writing. At last he’d prove Nina wrong, show her he’d been right to leave, how he had needed to follow his talent, his mission.

  He was deaf to the gym with its streams of cooled air sealed away with the opera and his dreams. He straightened himself in the chair, sat up and stretched again. His hand caught the headphone lead, dragging it from his ear – he heard the metal clank of the weights, the scratching of the broom dragged over the floor by a black cleaner. Rudely his flock of birds scattered, hit the wall, fell into the pool and drowned.

  The woman cleaning the floor was his mother’s age. She wore an ankle-length mauve skirt and dirty black slippers. Between each stroke on the floor she stopped, leant on the handle and tried to recover her strength before going on. No one noticed her. Viktor pushed the earphones back onto his ears, closed the notebook and got up. He reached for his wallet and walked to the wheezing woman. He bent over and handed a ten-dollar note to her, sealed in the palm of his hand so no one saw, a trick he’d already learnt in Zimbabwe. She looked at the folded green note and let the broom fall to the ground. ‘Thank you, mister. Thank you, sir,’ she said.

  Restored, Viktor left the building, his birds perched again inside his hollowed chest, ready to fly.

  *

  Whether he admitted it or not, there was a competition – and, for now, his daughter had lost. He was with Anne-Marie: in bed with her at night, making coffee for her in the morning, sharing the greatest part of his life with her. He had chosen her over his daughter. This was the history that will be taught, Viktor said to himself, and it will assume the same truth that states that Lenin led to Stalin. Family proceeds along the path of least resistance. He could have stayed in the UK and not boarded the plane to Harare; he could have resisted Anne-Marie’s advances and not reciprocated with his own. He could have surrendered any attempt to see life beyond Rosa. He could have badgered, pestered, used the law. He could even have killed Nina – that at least would have marked the historical record, imprinted on the little girl’s consciousness his determination to be with her.

  Instead he had thrown himself into the spinning, ceaseless rotation of a different universe. Viktor was now elsewhere, living and breathing in a place permanently caught in the shadow of Rosa’s absence.

  ‘Do you know what the one paradox is with Nelson? It’s his vanity,’ Viktor said one late evening when he returned from another mission on Nelson’s orders. ‘He knows how he looks – those long dreadlocks and Mandela shirts. And he speaks so carefully, it’s all so crafted. I can’t figure out where the man is. He seems to be pure politics.’

  ‘It’s not true!’ Anne-Marie exclaimed. ‘Nelson’s a bloo
dy entrepreneur. Have you seen his back room? Full to the ceiling with sacks of mealie-meal, sugar, oil. He doesn’t park his car in that garage. There’s no room – it’s full of barrels of petrol. He could blow up that entire block of flats. Viktor, Nelson is a capitalist, or at least a cross-border trader. There’s your contradiction,’ she said, swinging her feet onto the bed. ‘He has excelled in the crisis. Scarcity has made him more than his revolution ever will. How do you think the organisation is paid for? The paper? The travel? Nelson is a dreadlocked capitalist in the heart of Africa. You know how it goes – “Fighting from arrival, fighting for survival”. Drop your romantic notions. Look elsewhere, mudiwa, if you are searching for purity.’

  ‘It’s not romantic,’ Viktor protested. ‘Even with his trading, I find it hard to see beyond the politics. He is the most entirely political person I have ever met. I feel I know him. Maybe not like you, but as hard as I try to see the person separated from his political interests, I can’t. I honestly don’t think Nelson exists divorced from politics.’

  Anne-Marie sighed loudly. ‘You don’t know him, or you don’t know Zimbabwe. Every inhalation is political. If you make it through the day, then into another day you’ve survived. And that’s political. Each week is a battle to scrape dollars together, to make a day’s sadza last three. And then you go to bed dreaming that God will take Mugabe and X-Party will be struck down with a biblical plague. Because the MDC have their – leur museau dans l’auge, their snout in the trough – and nothing can be changed through simple endeavour any more. The only resistance left is God’s. See, you’ve got me now.’ She kicked at the wall, irritated. ‘Just don’t cast me into your London drama of heroes and villains from the Third World. All Zimbabweans have done is fail. Not quite as catastrophically as the Congolese, as my family, but they have failed. Failed.’ Then, almost shouting, as though the point could only be made in French, ‘Échoué!’

  Viktor stretched back on the chair, bending the plastic back and cracking his vertebrae. He felt the night through the open window. It was a strange winter. The cloudless night skies blew a hard wind, but in the day, in town, moving around in taxis and queuing in glum, silent lines for lifts, the sun burnt.