by Zeilig, Leo;
Anne-Marie swept her braids behind her ears, her mouth open. The whites of her eyes shone in the room, the crescents of four moons orbiting her irises. Playful, her speech finished, she leant forward and ran her hands along the insides of Viktor’s thighs. ‘Did you fall for my eyes or mouth first?’
‘Your mouth.’
‘Good. I’m pleased it was my mouth.’ She laughed and licked her lips. ‘Should we go to bed?’
‘Bed?’
‘Yes. Make love. Don’t you like making love with me?’
‘Yes,’ Viktor answered, looking down, avoiding her eyes.
‘Don’t be shy. I know you do, chéri.’
They both stood. Anne-Marie pressed herself against him. ‘Now I give you permission,’ she said, ‘to be as romantic as you want.’
Anne-Marie, after their first night together, had, with the minimum of romance, started calling Viktor a number of different appellations: darling, mudiwa, molongani na gai, chéri. This was not an act of possession, just a daily acknowledgement that the sex – the most easy, joyful lovemaking Viktor had ever experienced – had changed something between them, bent the normal conventions of friendship.
No matter how much or how little time they spent in bed, Anne-Marie always gave the orders. ‘Tonight I want to feel the air on our bodies when we faire l’amour,’ she’d say, flinging the windows open. Or she’d say, ‘Mudiwa, let’s just sleep tonight,’ let him drowse with her arms around him, and then use her hands to get him hard, to make him come. ‘Good boy,’ she’d say, and then fall asleep.
Most of all, though, she loved to cajole him into explicitness, to draw from his lips things he would never have dared speak. Perhaps she needed to hear them to believe them. She was in this mood tonight. ‘Tell me what you want, mudiwa.’
Viktor deflected. ‘You know what I want,’ and drew her close. Anne-Marie smiled and shook her head, pulling away.
‘No, com. Say it.’
‘I ... I want,’ Viktor fumbled, ‘I want to masturbate you.’
She clicked her tongue. ‘Masturbate me! So clinical! Are we in a classroom? Tell me what you want, Viktor. You can type these things but you cannot say them to me?’ She pushed him onto the bed, a little roughly, and straddled him, pinning him with the weight of her body. Her eyes flashed with amusement. ‘What you mean is that you want to fuck me with your fingers. Isn’t that right?’
Viktor nodded.
‘Say it.’
He flushed and looked away. ‘I want to ... to fuck you. With my fingers.’ His voice was quiet, earnest, a little shaky.
Anne-Marie laughed. ‘Do you, mudiwa? No one is listening. Say it like you mean it.’ She leant down to kiss him. Viktor felt, at that moment, something change in him. He took her by the waist and twisted them, suddenly, so that he was on top. She landed on her back with a grin. This time he spoke with confidence: ‘I want to fuck you with my fingers. To start with.’
‘That’s it, chéri! Now you are here with me.’ She reached up and took his hand.
Chapter Twenty-Four
One of Viktor’s first missions – part of Nelson’s efforts to hammer Zimbabwe’s complexity into the visitor, and to test a man who had waltzed into town and right into his ex-partner’s bed, something Nelson never mentioned – was a four-hour interview with X-Party’s ex-MP, Guthrie Madhuku. Guthrie was outspoken, slicing and chopping with his hands at everything before him: the foolish elites of his own party, occasionally even the old man. He spared his greatest wrath for the ‘imperialists and the puppets’, he said, who had now organised themselves into the MDC, the opposition funded and supported by the British, the Americans and the Australians. He roared his disapproval, the skin drawn tight over his hollow cheeks.
Viktor journeyed through Harare to the township and the large brick house Guthrie had built for himself, in the middle of a constituency that used to be his until a young, stupid MDC member only just out of university had won the seat from him. Sitting at the back of the ten-seater taxi that drove, in these hard times, with twenty passengers, Viktor prised the window open. His leg was bent high into the seat in front of him, his head half out of the window. The taxis passed the high-rises, down the large boulevards. In these parts of Harare, if you averted your gaze from the gutters, the city could look almost prosperous.
Viktor liked the warm breeze on his face. He liked feeling free from the need to speak, to try and convince the passengers that he was not like the whites they’d seen in Zimbabwe, in Borrowdale, in the four-by-fours, on TV, who until recently had owned 95 per cent of the land, living like kings and queens and sending their children to private schools in South Africa. He resisted the urge to tell them that he was on their side, whatever side that was, and that his family struggled, that his parents survived in their seventies on a state pension that was so modest it kept them awake at night. He wanted to say that he knew Zimbabweans who lived in London as desperately as they survived here in Harare.
Or, worse still, the desire which had overwhelmed him when he last took the taxi to rip his headphones out of his ears and speak about the music he was listening to. Squeezed between two women, holding bags of bruised and rotten vegetables on their laps, in a cascade of words, Viktor had explained that Verdi supported the revolutions of 1848 and that it had been illegal under Austrian occupation in Northern Italy, where his operas were performed, to play an encore. ‘You see, an encore was deemed a political act and outlawed. And Verdi, the greatest composer of all time, perhaps the greatest man of all time, was on the side of the poor, the wretched. Even when he was famous and his music was performed across the world, in Egypt, across Europe, in North America, on this continent, he composed for us, for the poor.’
Continuing, fevered, Viktor spoke quickly. ‘When he wrote down what he did, under his name, he didn’t write composer, dramatist, director, but farmer. Farmer!’ Viktor had shouted in the taxi. ‘Do you hear that? He was still the son of a peasant, a smallholder, tilling a plot of land. Like Zimbabweans; he was practically Zimbabwean. Verdi was Zimbabwean, like you. Do you see?’
Forced to sit next to a man who had clearly lost his senses, the women had nodded their heads nervously and looked at each other. Viktor had plunged his hand into his bag, removed his iPod and given each woman an earpiece, insisted they insert it as he played the opening piece: ‘Do you hear that? The hope of liberation. The sweep of the music – and that last part, where the entire orchestra rises, lifts. There is no harmony for over a minute, until the voices hit that high ... You see the effect? What Verdi wanted was the sense of an entire oppressed nation singing in a single voice ... You hear it, the whole chorus singing of their oppression? This song became an anthem of the poor, farmers, hawkers, like you. Do you hear that whistle, the flute? Verdi put it there as a sign he was against the police, against the Austrians. Against ZANU. Do you hear the flute?’
Over the sound of the opera, the two women, shocked, obedient, listening to the music, Viktor had shouted, with tears in his eyes, ‘Do you hear? Can you hear the flute?’
Viktor phoned Guthrie, a finger plugging one ear, the phone pressed hard against the other, to tell him he’d arrived. He walked through the labyrinth of narrow, muddy alleys between the old brick houses, the shacks, the dried-out front gardens with tufts of dying grass.
As Viktor found his way through the township he turned up his hoodie, pulled down on the string cords, shuffled his hands into his sleeves and tried to vanish, to un-white himself. Instead of a murungu, he was a township youth, moving unnoticed through the neighbourhood. The effect was to turn this stringy, oversized white man, with worn jeans and trainers threadbare enough to arouse the pity of even the most distraught Zimbabwean, into the Grim Reaper. Children drew back; mothers and fathers came out of their shacks to stare at this cloaked, bent figure of death, come to remind them again that though they may have just emerged from oblivion, they were soon to return.
Guthrie saw Viktor’s head over the gate and he laughed.<
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The house was absurd, grandiose and incongruous: two storeys, pebbledashed, painted white like a London semi, like Archway. The plastic grass on the front lawn sweated in the heat. Guthrie stood on the stoop. Around him was a crowd of people, sitting in the garden and leaning against the brick walls, beside them checked shopping bags fastened with safety pins, all of them quiet, seemingly unaware of each other or of Guthrie who sat with one arm resting on the open door to the house, sipping a bottle of Zambezi.
They’re trying to levitate the house. It’s a religious wake, Viktor thought. He raised his hand to greet Guthrie. Any minute now they’re going to start chanting, ‘Jesus is number one’, and this breeze-block monstrosity is going to take off and lift clear of the township. God will have finally acted in this forsaken country, not to liberate the poor, but to rid Highfield of bad architecture.
Guthrie did not waste time. He shouted for Viktor to let himself in and then, in Shona, for chairs and beer to be brought out for the guest. The two men sat, the plastic legs of the chairs skidding and splaying under their weight.
‘So you’re a Nelsonite? Another intellectual from the school of theory and high principle. I respect him, Nelson, he’s better than the entire rotten MDC and he believes in his principles, not like those pretenders, Tsvangirai, Chamisa, Mutambara, who know nothing. But he’s wrong.’
Viktor tilted the bottle of beer, sipped. ‘What do you mean by wrong?’
‘As in not right. Wrong. Incorrect. In error. Prune Nelson of his rhetorical superfluities and what is left of our idealist? He says he reads Marx, Engels, Lenin, but he needs to step out of the world of ideas and see the real world of people and choices. He’s pampered, swollen by starry-eyed idealism. He has his hopes fixed on uprisings in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, France, the UK. But it’s infantile. It is a childish pseudo-Marxism.’ Guthrie slurped on his bottle and wiped his mouth aggressively with the back of his sleeve.
‘I think that’s unfair. Nelson seems sensible to me. He’s aware of the real world. He doesn’t support the MDC, but argues that an MDC government would at least open democratic space, so that real struggles could take place.’ Viktor tried to exorcise the schoolboy debater, to deepen his voice.
‘Fools. All of you. Tsvangirai in power? It will never happen. What is he, this ex-general secretary of the trade union movement? Neocolonialism operates in the MDC. What does Nelson think? The Brits, you lot’ – Guthrie waved a hand in Viktor’s direction – ‘are battling to install Tsvangirai to speed up the arrival of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by Nelson Chitambure. What conceit. What naivety.’
Viktor interrupted. ‘That’s not Nelson’s position. He says the ZANU-PF government is petit bourgeois, that ZANU’s anti-imperialism is fake.’ As hard as he tried, Viktor still sounded scholarly.
‘Rubbish! And that position reveals him for what he is: a romantic fool, not even against capitalism.’ Shouting now, Guthrie waved his hands in front of Viktor. ‘How dare he take the moral high ground about ZANU’s character! The neocolonial pressure we have lived through since 1980, when we made too many compromises, all that nonsense that even Mugabe fell for, preaching “love your neighbour, love the white bosses”. But now Nelson must see that for the first time in Zimbabwe since 1980, for the first time on the continent, ZANU is overthrowing the neocolonial past! But your Nelson—’
‘He’s not my Nelson.’
‘Your Nelson,’ Guthrie repeated, ‘and his fake leftism amount to refining and perpetuating neocolonialism!’ Guthrie’s tone, the excitement in his voice, raised each word almost to a scream. ‘How can you miss the revolutionary import accomplished by ZANU-PF in the last ten years?’ Guthrie paused and took in a mouthful of air, restoring his faculties, and continued. ‘I mean, the best, truest revolutionary elements of ZANU-PF, not the self-serving time-wasters, but the revolutionary reforms that have been forced through against international and domestic opponents – British, American, the EU, UN, NATO, all the jackals – in the puppet structures of the MDC as well as against opponents, opportunists within ZANU.’
Guthrie turned his head and shouted into the house, shrill and loud, his principal oratorical devices. ‘More beer, more beer! do not close off’
‘We’ve learnt from Mao, from the Chinese, the importance of tactical alliances. Unite with the Kuomintang to oust the Japanese. We have localised ownership of land.’ Guthrie tore off the bottle-tops with his teeth, handed a bottle to Viktor, spat out the buckled cap and drained half of his bottle into his mouth. He continued: ‘ZANU-PF nationalists have domesticated class contradictions over the country’s prime means of production. This is the best way, the only way, of moving towards the full and final socialisation of land. We have created a giant wedge between a comprador petit bourgeois politics by creating a real national bourgeoisie. A step forward. A giant step forward. As a Marxist, how can you not defend that? What are you, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. More a humanist. A Hegelian, I suppose. Fanonian ...’ Viktor mumbled.
Guthrie laughed. ‘Nelson has sent me a London Hegelian. I tell you, he is more lost than I thought. Is your recorder still running?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. What we’ve seen recently in the new land disputes is the landless peasantry fighting the new African latifundia class. Open black-on-black class struggle, inconceivable when the white landed aristocracy ruled Zimbabwe. Never before seen. A new class of African bourgeoisie landowners based on really existing property relations, in a continent that has only seen, since 1960, since independence, a caste of middlemen, profiteers, the pseudo-bourgeoisie, overseers of Western capital. Do you not see?’ Guthrie reverted to upper case: ‘And THIS, NOT abstract, romantic, learnt-by-heart quotes from Lenin and Marx, has taken the African revolution one GIANT step forward!’
Viktor was confused. He wanted to interrupt but didn’t know how. Surely this sunken old fighter was correct. Why hadn’t he seen it? Why couldn’t he see? Nelson, beautiful, vain and irrelevant, running against the grain of history just when, for once, history was moving in the right direction. Why must we, the left, the thinking ideological poor, me, Nelson, Tendai, always be on the wrong side when it matters, always seek out the lost cause, the losing argument? What DNA do we carry that causes us always, everywhere, to get it wrong?
Viktor wanted to get up, stretch his legs across the stoop, but he couldn’t. All around him was this silent, unmoving crowd, leaning against the house. In front of Viktor, on the floor, around the two men, were dozens of silent, waiting Zimbabweans. Why did Nelson send me here? Is this another test? Guthrie’s voice resounded around his yard.
Guthrie drained the beer, then cast the bottle by its neck onto the gravel drive. It smashed and pieces of glass flew into the air. Guthrie dropped his arm, felt blindly on the floor, found another bottle and brought it to his mouth. ‘Drink up, come on. Drink. DRINK!’
Viktor sipped his beer nervously.
Staring out, in a more reflective tone, Guthrie continued, ‘The only nation that has been able to outdrink us is the British. How is London? I spent years in the city on a scholarship in the sixties. A Commonwealth Scholarship. All I wanted to do was read, to be in the country of the Brontës, Marx, Engels. Dickens. Agh, Dickens!’ Guthrie straightened in his seat and spread his arms, holding an open bottle in one hand and an unopened bottle in the other. ‘“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss and in their struggles to be truly free, in the triumphs and defeats, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time gradually making expiation for itself”.’ He turned his head to Viktor and smiled. ‘I was studying at King’s and applied to stay in Bloomsbury. The university found me a room with a childless couple in Croydon. Fucking Croydon. Have you ever been there? Let me say this, Croydon is not the cradle of English civilisation. The husband was an old army captain who had served in Burma, Manila, Indochina. He sat snorting at me through dinner. But the wife, ah, the wife, she was excited to have an
original black man in the house. She thought I was some sort of stallion, brought up in the jungle. On my first night they served me tinned spaghetti on toast. I wanted to leave and get back to Africa that night. Croydon, horrible place. The English suburbs are death.’
‘I tend to agree with you. Much of the UK is like Croydon,’ Viktor replied.
‘Yes, racist and ugly.’ Guthrie paused before continuing on the old track. The mood was calmer now, even amicable, the two men having managed to find a place in south-east London, where they could meet. ‘You see, Nelson, he is preoccupied by names, figures, characters. And Zimbabwe has them all: Morgan, Robert, Tendai, each of them partial and flawed. He is close to each of them. Zimbabwean society is so small, so he feels personally disgusted by ZANU’s betrayal. As a child in the eighties, he grew up adoring ZANU like a son loves his father. Now he’s also outraged by MDC’s veniality. He is a child in revolt; the Chitambure School is the School of Betrayal. But as a Marxist, a genuine Marxist’ – Guthrie threw another bottle onto the lawn and started to pick up speed again – ‘what are people to social processes, to the dialectic?’
Viktor finished his beer and held the bottle in his lap. Guthrie asked, ‘Have you finished?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then throw it away.’ Viktor delicately placed the empty bottle on the ground.
‘No, throw it!’ Guthrie ordered.
Dutifully Viktor picked the bottle up, tried to aim for the narrow drive, the modest, plastic lawn, to cast the bottle over the heads of the figures squatting and sitting around the two men. Inexplicably the bottle spun in the air, turned like the sails of a windmill and flew towards the crowd sitting at the far end of the garden. Silently the two men watched the bottle twist and turn in the air. It missed the gate and continued over the garden wall, out of the compound and disappeared. There was a thud, then a scream of pain.