An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Viktor jumped up. ‘Shit, I must have hit someone!’

  Guthrie leant forward, grabbed Viktor’s arm and pulled him back to his seat. ‘Forget it. You have to see the big picture, comrade, not the individual act, the single blunder. The process, not the person. You have to learn to distinguish between social processes and people.’

  After another swig of beer, Guthrie continued, ‘You see, ZANU is rooted deep in the countryside, it has real support. No local party will be able to unseat it in the coming elections, in any election. What’s more, the MDC is weak, corrupt, blundering. However fair and transparent you make the elections, ZANU will not be removed.’

  Viktor spoke quickly. ‘But when have elections ever really been fair in Zimbabwe?’

  ‘Often. True, we had to muddy a bit, crack some skulls at the start of the century to make sure the MDC was roundly defeated. If we had naively allowed an MDC victory, we would have seen a second Rhodesia. Worse and more violent than the first, more than anything we had done. White-run, white-led, white-aligned, with the usual black puppets. Supported by the imperialists. It would have required a war worse than the last to decolonise us. A nasty, bloody chimurenga.’ Guthrie was drunk now. He leant forward and began to enunciate his words loudly and with great effort. ‘Do you not see? What the French did in Mali. The British and Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Does he want to take back Zimbabwe to classical neocolonialism, the blight of the continent since independence? How will the poor be more confident then? His thinking, this Nelson of yours, is the thinking of the true theorist of the petit bourgeoisie. A suicidal Narodnik.’

  With this Guthrie fell back in his chair, stretched, then dropped one hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. He sighed. The sun had fallen back from the porch and was retreating quickly across the garden. When Guthrie lowered his hand and looked again at Viktor, he seemed exhausted.

  ‘I moved away from Croydon after two weeks and stayed with Zimbabweans in north London. I felt like a guerrilla fighter, planning, fantasising where I would plant a bomb, Algeria-style. The theatres on the Strand, Harrods, the coffee shops in Covent Garden. For the first months this was how I survived. I would take the war against colonialism to the motherland, to their soil. At the weekends I would dress up and go to the Savoy, the Dorchester on Park Lane, take the lift to the top floor. And in the middle of the empty corridors I would take a shit. Oh yes, I would turn over the chamber pot right in the middle of the carpet to acquaint those Sons of Albion with the colour of my dung. That was a sweet feeling. If I could have got into the palace I would have done the same things right in the middle of Queen Victoria’s suite.’

  What could Viktor say to that? As much as he tried, he couldn’t avoid the image of the youthful, gaunt Guthrie crouching in a London hotel, holding open his bum cheeks, pushing and grunting against a mighty enemy with hopeless, alienated agency. Who would have had to clean up his protest? Before he was a cabbie, Jack had worked shifts in hotels as a lobby boy. Plain, gentle, opera-singing Jack – who as a child Viktor had loved most after his parents, even before his twin sister – would have been forced to clean up the mess of empire. In Viktor’s own childhood he had fantasies wishing his own death would come before Isaac’s, Sonia’s and Jack’s; now he realised Jack would have been charged with cleaning up Guthrie’s dung. Where was the logic in making an enemy of the Jewish UK proletariat? They are your natural ally, Guthrie, not the Sons of Albion.

  After a short pause, Viktor replied, ‘Well, today it is Zimbabwean asylum-seekers who have to empty the chamber pots in London hotels.’

  Guthrie nodded at Viktor’s comment. It seemed to please him. Then he shouted again for more beer. There was a noise behind them in the house, the faint, just-audible peeling of the seal as the fridge door opened, and the heavy clink of bottles.

  ‘For all the respect I have for your Nelson, he’s dangerous and sows illusions. He should know better. An educated man of Nelson’s calibre preaching in the language of Marx and oppressed workers is dangerous. You see, Enoch, I take my politics seriously.’

  ‘My name is Viktor.’

  ‘Never again in Zimbabwe will any politician with foreign support win an election. No power in Zimbabwe will be wielded against the disinherited. This is the historical road that we have set this country on. No longer are we simply Zimbabwean for ourselves! We have become a continental symbol of the final struggle against neocolonialism and neoliberalism. You see, Enoch—’

  ‘It’s Viktor.’

  ‘Viktor, we are the coming storm. We are the future. Already the youth in South Africa look to us, follow the old man, watch us for inspiration. They wear our T-shirts: Mugabe is Right, Seize the Land. The whites, the puppet blacks, they are living on borrowed time.’ Guthrie stood, lifted himself onto the centre post of the stoop. When he was standing he shook a little on his legs, waited for the rush of blood around his system to settle. He looked out over his plot of land. Viktor looked with him at the front lawn, the dead souls, the rusted Toyota in the drive, the bonnet open, its insides gutted, the leads, brakes, wheels spread around the carcass. ‘Do you know African history?’

  ‘A little,’ Viktor answered.

  With a sweep of his arm, indicating the horizon, the row of shacks, lean-tos, plastic port-a-loos in the near distance, Guthrie said, ‘We are what Ghana was in 1957 to the rest of the continent, still struggling under colonialism. We are a symbol of a black government, a beacon for the future. Except we have learnt from the last fifty years. No compromise with the whites, with the north, no gentlemen’s agreement with the imperialists. The history of colonialism, stolen land, pillaged mines and minerals, has been corrected not with slow steps and compensation but total expropriation. No reconciliation. All of this in a single step. The backward nigger history of failure and defeat on the continent has been transformed. We have set it on the right course. The failure, the lies, the theft, the inferiority that we Africans have internalised and passed from generation to generation is going.’ Guthrie paused, then continued breathlessly, ‘You see, the coastal shelf of our continent is deep with the remains of our dead ancestors – slaves, victims, the bodies of defeated armies. No more, Enoch, no more.’ Guthrie fell back once more into his chair, sighed, and said, ‘“It was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light”.’

  Sometime later, after more beer, Guthrie walked Viktor to the gate. The two men lingered, not wanting to part, to break the spell.

  Still confused, his head awash with beer, Viktor struggled to focus in the grey-brown night that had settled on the township. ‘Can I ask you, Guthrie, who all these people are?’ Viktor indicated the still, silent people lining the house and garden.

  Guthrie turned quickly around, his eyes wide; he surveyed the garden, the front of his house, the perimeter wall. He looked again at Viktor with raised eyebrows. ‘Oh, them?’ he answered casually. ‘They’re just my family from the rural areas.’

  ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘They live here.’

  As Viktor walked away, trying to find the route back to the main road, he heard Guthrie shout, ‘Tell Nelson I say hello!’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Viktor could no longer sit still and chase away the sadness long enough to write. Although he sat in his familiar place, listening to the mechanical grumble of the coffee machine and Louis’s salutations, he was unable to find the pleasure of routine, the comfort of his own company, the joy of Tosca, which had once given him hope. Instead everything marked time: the song, the arias, the finished page, the coffee drunk, the road paced; each represented a loss, a step away from Rosa and towards his mother’s death.

  Weeks after arriving in Harare he phoned his parents. He reserved his most acute feelings of guilt for his parents; nothing could command as much fear and self-loathing as they could. He pictured them cowed and bent by his absence, his father more cantankerous and irritable and both of them maintaining their rigid and insistent defence of him, no matter h
ow irrefutable the evidence.

  Viktor had sent two cards obtusely referring to ‘pressing work’ and promising a telephone call. The front of the first card pictured an elephant ambling in dirt-brown scrub, leafless trees in the distance, a field of trampled earth around the animal. Viktor wondered if the elephant would comfort his mother, show her that he was in good, reliable, ancient company.

  Sonia wanted her son next to her. His happiness meant more to her than her own meagre joys – the meals she prepared, the books she read, the games she played with her grandchildren. Though Isaac knew how to elbow pain aside, he too brooded for his son. And Viktor? He was given what he wanted, only he did not recognise it and gave it away again. Everyone wants what they don’t have – except my parents, Viktor thought.

  Walking to the telephone shop, it was for his mother that his heart lurched. His parents lived by separate phones in the same house. Sonia hovered around the kitchen phone that had been fastened for thirty years to the wall and had never needed to be repaired or serviced. She made phone calls laboriously, winding the dial, placing her finger nervously into the numbered holes. She answered the phone with the same caution: ‘Ye-e-e-e-ss?’ Isaac, upstairs in his study, where he spent the day playing Solitaire on Viktor’s twenty-year-old computer or, when he was asked, doing his daughter’s accounts or working for his old employers, would seize the phone when it rang and exclaim, ‘Yes, who’s there?’ in sync with his wife’s separate, tentative echo.

  Viktor picked his time, knowing where they would be midweek, the shopping done. He would only have to speak once to both of them. He sat in the corner cubicle of the vaulted telephone shop. The morning was quiet and cool, the windows to the street open, half the stools empty, with little to distract Viktor from his parents’ faint, faraway voices.

  ‘Mum,’ Viktor said, ‘it’s me.’

  ‘Who?’ came his father’s voice, booming, resounding in the receiver.

  ‘Me, Dad. Viktor.’

  ‘Joseph, is that you?’ his mother asked.

  ‘Who’s Joseph?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘Joseph!’ shouted Isaac.

  ‘No, it’s me.’

  ‘Viktor!’ they said in unison.

  ‘Vik. Vik. Vik,’ his father stuttered with emotion.

  ‘Who’s Joseph?’ Viktor repeated, offended.

  ‘I don’t know. Sonia, who’s Joseph?’

  ‘Joseph? We don’t know any Josephs, unless you mean Joseph who lives off Muswell Hill,’ Sonia answered.

  ‘We haven’t been in touch with him for years. Why would he be phoning?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘Did they leave a message?’ Sonia questioned.

  ‘No, Sonia, he hasn’t phoned us for years. Anyway, I think he moved to Tel Aviv with his daughter,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Did they? I didn’t even know he had a daughter. What about his wife?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘She died. Remember, he was alone, never remarried,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible. He must be devastated,’ Sonia commented.

  ‘Sonia, it happened years ago.’

  Viktor, still holding the phone, stood up, adjusted his position, folded a leg under his buttocks and sat down again. Do they even know that I’m on the phone? Have they forgotten that I called? He saw his parents communicating to each other on separate phones like household walkie-talkies, gossiping about a long-dead neighbour, the sound of their voices reverberating through the hallways and stairwell.

  Isaac was still working in his mid-seventies, keeping the accounts of the estate agency he had run for forty years but never owned. Viktor knew his father’s mood hinged on the single, precarious possibility of a call from his old employer. The obnoxious son of the old owner, whom Isaac had teased, lifted onto his desk, sweeping aside the survey reports, maps, calculator when Martin was a boy. A boy who had grown up cursed with too much attention and money. Martin was the same age as Viktor and he held Isaac’s daily happiness in his hand. ‘No one does it like you, old man. Can I borrow you for a couple of days to fix our figures?’ Speaking with familiarity, unaware how Isaac bristled.

  ‘Mum, Dad,’ Viktor said, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t phoned.’

  ‘Your mother was worried, Vik.’

  ‘We were both worried,’ Sonia said, her voice clear.

  ‘But you got the cards, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes we did, son,’ Sonia replied.

  ‘Are you okay? We just didn’t understand why you had to go like that. Without telling anyone.’ Isaac’s voice cracked.

  Viktor was silent.

  ‘Stop that, Isaac – he’s on the phone now, isn’t he? Are you safe? How’s your health?’

  Sonia, dressed in floral blouses and pleated blue and grey skirts that she ironed meticulously on Sundays, the same day she hung out her underwear neatly on the line, seven pairs. Even when he was small Viktor had averted his eyes from the sight of his mother’s underclothes and had not joined in Isaac’s gentle chiding: ‘Do you have different days of the week marked on them, honey? Tuesday’s pants, Sunday’s pants?’ His mother had laughed bashfully behind her hands.

  Sonia had slaved until her hands were red and chapped, cooking and serving food in the Lemon Tree café and takeaway. ‘My mother is a chef,’ Viktor had announced proudly to his school friends. Her spread of plastic and wooden chopping boards was arranged in the kitchen for every eventuality, it seemed, except creativity – yet her food, cooked for her affluent high-street customers, was an inspired fusion. It confused her north London fanbase and stunned her family into dinner table silence. What wondrous tastes, knotted together with mathematical precision and with cleanliness worthy of an operating theatre, not a working-class Archway kitchen. She still cooked there sometimes.

  ‘Well, I’m okay. I had to come here quickly because of the crisis in the country.’

  ‘What is this crisis to do with you, Vik?’ his father asked.

  ‘I’m a journalist, you know that.’

  ‘Since when have you been a journalist?’ Sonia enquired, speaking quickly, her voice wavering. ‘Darling, I thought you were a college lecturer doing a PhD.’

  ‘Yes, I am, but I’m also a journalist.’ Viktor felt the conversation slipping from his prearranged script. The large, rusted fans chopped lethargically at the air above the bank of phones and cubicles.

  ‘You mean your thing on the World Wide Web?’ Sonia stated.

  ‘Blog. It’s called a blog, Mum.’

  ‘Your father reads me what you write,’ Sonia said.

  ‘It’s not just a blog. I write for other websites, online magazines. I’m working for an online activist newspaper.’

  ‘That sounds dangerous, Vik. Are you being safe? I heard the other day about these scams, these 519 scams,’ Isaac said.

  ‘It’s 419, they’re 419 scams, Dad, and they’re from Nigeria. I am in Zimbabwe,’ Viktor corrected him, trying to keep his tone flat.

  ‘In Zimbabwe!’ his parents exclaimed together.

  ‘Zimbabwe? Why are you there?’ Isaac added.

  ‘I explained. I told you I was in Zimbabwe. Where did you think I was?’

  ‘Well, we knew you were in Africa. We thought it was Zambimwe,’ Isaac said defensively.

  ‘Zambimwe? There is no Zambimwe. It’s Zimbabwe, in Southern Africa,’ Viktor explained, irritation creeping into his voice.

  They were silent for a moment, then Sonia asked, ‘When are you coming home, sweetie?’

  ‘He’s doing important work, Sonia. He knows what he’s doing, don’t you, Vik? He knows, he knows ...’ Isaac’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Sonia interjected, ‘but it’s not him, it’s where he is. I don’t understand why he has to be doing this work. I think it’s interfering.’ The hurt in her voice was clear.

  ‘Sonia, we have taught our kids to interfere and look after their neighbours. The bottom line is, he has a big heart, that one. I am proud of him; maybe he’ll bring some sense down there,’ Isaac boomed with
false momentary confidence.

  Viktor agreed with his mother. What was he doing here, interfering in a country, a continent that had already been ravaged by white people for centuries? He looked at the other cubicles, people locked into conversations, watching the counters nervously as they ticked away their change, pricing their conversations with families in South Africa, in the UK, the US, quickly arranging the pick-up from Western Union, hurrying out the family news, conveying somehow a sense of love and missing.

  Sonia spoke again. ‘Of course I’m proud of you, sweetie, darling. We both are. So’s Amy. We were saying that the other day.’ His parents continued their intercom conversation, agreeing and conferring with each other.

  Viktor was silent.

  I have made them suffer again. We are diminished by old age, nothing else. As we are pulled towards death we lose everything – wisdom, hope, perspective and taste. Viktor’s most uncomfortable reflection was that his mother’s cooking, her great, creative endeavour in life, was suffering because she was losing her power of taste. As his parents spoke to each other, arranged their evening, spoke about Amy’s children, Viktor thought, why couldn’t his mother’s taste buds remain unaffected by ageing? He wanted her to stop ageing.

  ‘Vik, Vik, are you there?’ Isaac shouted down the phone.

  ‘Yes, Dad, I’m here.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Rosa? Is that woman letting you speak to your daughter?’ Isaac spoke loudly, stridently.

  ‘No, Dad. I haven’t phoned. I’ve been sending her postcards. I don’t know if she gets them.’

  They were all silent again; the phone hissed and bubbled with static.

  ‘When are you back, Vik? We miss you,’ Isaac finally said.

  ‘Soon, Dad, soon, Mum. I promise. Soon. I’m almost finished.’

  *

  Dearest Comrade – and friend – Viktor!

  The short response to the storm in Southern Africa is: YES, YES, YES, at last you are getting involved, Anne-Marie has told me how you are helping! To being involved, in any way, in the struggle of the exploited and oppressed, with the aim of inspiring others to do likewise! You are learning well.