An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  ‘I am Biko.’ I teach everyone here to say it. It’s still a bit new to them – I tell them to watch the quite excellent Spartacus film, but to replace the name Spartacus with Biko. ‘I’m Biko!’ ‘No, I’m Biko!’ Arrests are nothing new to us, beatings were our bread and butter, so know you are not alone. We are fighting here to support the campaign that you are leading.

  Take care my friend. I’M BIKO. WE WANT CAIRO IN HARARE! CAIRO IN HARARE! CAIRO TO HARARE! HARARE WILL BE CAIRO! MU-GABE-MU-BARAK, MU-GABE-MU-BARAK! BIKO WILL START IT ALL.

  Once we have let Anne-Marie loose on X-Party, the prisons will open.

  Sala kakuhle!

  Tendai

  *

  Every time Biko, in his steady student English, tried to take hold of the cell, Hopewell fought with the same refrain: ‘You are a boy. What d’you know about life? What’s more, you’re Ndebele. Uri kundinzwa here? Takakukundai. Takauraya vana mukoma venyu nana tete. We defeated you. Killed your brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Tribalism,’ Biko spat back. ‘None of your thoughts, brother, are yours. Your brain is a sodden, alcoholic mess. You speak as you’ve been taught. You are ZANU shit, ZANU meat. You have nothing to say. You should be on the other side of this door with our jailors, the police, the dictators. You are a dog.’

  When his strength returned, Biko tried to shepherd the cell into self-activity: action to keep their souls together and raise Hopewell’s lumpen peasant consciousness. If it meant the war would have to be defended with force when persuasion failed, then Biko would hammer their ignorant heads against the cell walls. Hopewell blustered on for a week, sat stubborn and dejected on his folded blanket trying not to listen to Biko’s sermons, hour after goddamn hour, until he saw it was easier to follow Samuel and Biko as they crafted the day into a coherent, bearable whole.

  Biko became their teacher. He had a constant euphoria and energy, a pounding, ceaseless rage at everything: the Marange diamond fields, ZANU and MDC corruption, business, the position of women and gays. An answer for everything. No matter the subject, he could readily link it back to the system, the whole.

  ‘Try me,’ Biko boasted, standing in the middle of the cell, his arms akimbo.

  ‘Okay,’ Hopewell said, twenty-one days in. He was beginning to accept Biko’s benign dictatorship, his leadership by hope. ‘The gays. I am against the gays. It’s unnatural, against God. A Western import. They don’t belong in Zimbabwe.’

  ‘Easy!’ Biko cried, leaping onto the concrete bed, his eyes glistening. ‘There has been homosexuality in Zimbabwe for as long as we have been fucking and loving. As long as we’ve been human. Which is many thousands of millennia longer than Europe. The Inanke caves of the Matobo Hills have illustrations, drawings of men on men, hand in hand, lovers, chiefs, elders. Our early societies – before even Great Zimbabwe existed – were run by homosexuals. We exported homosexuality to Europe. Mugabe is anti-gay because he has been influenced by European Catholicism, by modern, imported Christianity. Jesus was a working-class Jewish homosexual. Get it?’

  ‘Shameful,’ Hopewell replied meekly, more a dying heckle than a challenge. He let out a sigh of resignation: another brick prised from his foothold on life and meaning.

  Biko continued, breathless. ‘Mugabe is terrified we’ll see the charade. The divisions between us are the only thing holding him in place, holding ZANU together. Poor against poor. Ndebele against Shona. Landless war veteran against landless street seller. Gay against straight. Don’t be Mugabe’s fool any more, comrade.’

  The cell filled with Biko’s circling, swirling arms, his booming oration and exuberance. His final words were thrown into the air, hitting the walls, crashing against the iron door like lead weights. But the prison was never forgotten. No fields of clover grew over the walls. The prison did not fall away with Biko’s explanations – though, slowly, Biko’s strange reasoning did begin to illuminate for Hopewell and Samuel why the prison was here, how their arrests and beatings – these seemingly irrelevant and arbitrary acts, the operations of a violent force in a Southern African police station – were at the centre of the world, connected to everything else.

  ‘What has happened to us, comrades?’ Biko spoke more calmly, more patiently than normal. ‘The insignificant brawls and illegal hawking, my beatings and arrest, are at the centre of things. Linked. Samuel sold vegetables in the high street because two years ago he lost his printing job. Hopewell has always drunk too much – Hopewell chidhakwa – but now he does nothing else. He’s been jobless for ten years. Ten years, comrade. There is not enough to eat because someone is eating our share. We have to seize our brief life before we are thrown back into darkness. This, comrades, is our one chance to live, and we must turn our bodies to the blinding light and make our own destiny. Ita zvinokupa upenyu kwete zvana Mugabe izvi.’

  Biko’s captive audience only vaguely understood.

  ‘Light!’ Hopewell screamed when Biko had finished. ‘Life!’ The lecture, audible outside their cell, sounded familiar to him, like the preachers he had heard before, the church services he’d attended when he had tried to sober up.

  Sanguine, uncertain, Samuel shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me, brother.’

  ‘No, together,’ Biko ordered, ‘we need to take back our light; we have nothing else, no other choice. We must pull our lives, our land, our wealth into the light. This will require a struggle, a grip of iron, like this.’ Biko leant forward to the men, grabbed the blankets under them and pulled. Then, holding up the dirt-stained covers in both hands, he shouted, ‘Our wealth, our life, into the light, before the night, before the power goes and we are thrown again into darkness!’

  Samuel shook his head. The boy was possessed; he would be killed if he carried on like this, even if he had a point. Who did he mean? Them? The light before night, when the bulb shone above them in the cell? Did he mean the power cuts since 2000? The load-shedding?

  ‘After me, brothers,’ Biko continued, ‘comrades, into the light.’

  Hopewell joined Biko, stood next to him; he shouted, his two fists in the air and his heart racing, ‘Into the light!’ Then they all shouted, Samuel slowly raising himself, rolling his eyes, ‘Into the light!’ Finally, Biko shouted ‘Life!’ and the others copied him in a chorus. ‘Light, light, light! Life, life, life!’ Eventually they were all shouting, creating a great rhythm, hammering with their flat hands on the walls, the door: ‘Light! Light! Light!’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Since his return from Bulawayo Viktor thought that he could simply do nothing for anyone, for his daughter in Bristol, for these new comrades in Zimbabwe. He carried in him some sort of curse. At last the equation was straightforward: he was simply no good. Good for nothing, in his father’s rough judgement about people. In Isaac’s precise dictionary he was simply a schmuck, a putz, a yutz.

  Anne-Marie had reacted not with the fury he’d expected, but with disappointment. ‘Are you really so stupid, Viktor? Did you think the police would say, yes, of course, white man, here are your friends? That all you had to do was ask to see the station chief? This is a dictatorship, not a restaurant, mudiwa. The old man does not care about your white skin.’ Her anger she reserved for Biko, for his carelessness. ‘Biko is a bloody fool! A bloody pavement café, mon Dieu ...’

  ‘I should have insisted we go home, or sat inside. I shouldn’t have tried to—’

  She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. ‘No. Not your fault. You don’t know Zimbabwe. No, no, this is Biko, Biko, Biko!’ She shouted the last Biko and stamped her foot. ‘Biko might be the heart of the Society, but Nelson is its brains.’

  ‘That’s not true. Biko has a brilliant theoretical mind, a formidable intellect.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. He doesn’t think, he just leaps into action. No wonder you like him. You think and never act, he acts and never thinks. You’re a perfect fucking pair, mudiwa.’

  She had paced the room, a difficult feat amid the clutter, then ignored Viktor as she
called Nelson to strategise, to find out who could go out to the village and talk to Biko’s family. Viktor sat near the window, miserable, tweeting.

  @viktorisaacs International solidarity for #Zimbabwe student activist arrested, beaten for dissent. Petition: bit.ly/325235 ... #FreeBiko #Bulawayo6

  Now these thoughts came to him in the early morning when the day was not yet in colour, only beginning to break; the long hours of waking life confronting him, opening out before him. I am a schmuck, he would think. Maybe my assemblage of character traits is just no damn good. I am not a nice person. I am a calculating, scheming, hesitant meshugener.

  One week later he heard that Biko was still being held and there was no date for his case, but that the others, the Bulawayo Six, had been released. When Y-Party refused all pleading he organised, phoned, raised funds on the internet – the one thing, even in his despair, he knew he could do. The armchair and the internet, he muttered, over another coffee at Louis’s, bent over his splattered and finger-worn laptop. He felt he had caused it all: Biko’s arrest, his daughter’s missing, all caused by his blundering.

  Somehow Anne-Marie managed to chase these chattering, corrosive thoughts from his early mornings. Perhaps it was her hot, soft body next to his, how she clung on in the night, called to him, her voice stripped of all straining, when he paced the flat at night, sat on the balcony and listened to distant TVs and crickets chirping loudly for partners. ‘Viktor, darling, come back to bed.’ But now he burrowed and questioned in broad daylight. Somehow the sun could no longer burn the thoughts away after they had formed.

  *

  As Viktor fought to free Biko, imperceptibly Louis became the campaign’s accountant. He allowed his UK bank account to be used for donations, made the transfers, secreted resources in US dollars through Zambia. He transported money on his trucks across the border, then ran payments to Biko’s family. He worked on connections he had in the police, bribing officials, pressuring Bulawayo politicians and paying lawyers’ fees into foreign accounts. Louis maintained the whole underground effort, the complex tributary of connections and contacts that was essential to make Zimbabwe move.

  Occasionally he would pull up a chair next to Viktor, who was usually working, campaigning on his laptop, and confer. ‘Vik, there is a contact who thinks he can get some money to the guards in Chikurubi – I have worked with him before, he is reliable. We have also got your man into his own cell with only two other prisoners.’ Breaking momentarily, he shouted an order at an old man who had taken his place by the coffee machine. ‘Goodwill, for God’s sake, how often do I need to tell you? Do not lean on the bloody machine!’ Muttering ‘fool’, he turned back to Viktor. ‘They also tell me that your man is okay.’

  Viktor was unresponsive. The effort of criticism – the constant, necessary challenge to everything in Louis’s world – was too much. ‘What is it, Vik?’ Louis probed.

  ‘I just don’t know if any of this will make a difference,’ Viktor answered. ‘What difference does it make if he is in his own cell or not? If you can bribe an official here and there? How do we know if your contact even knows what’s happening? The truth is, we know nothing.’

  Louis bunched forward, leant on the table, tilting it towards him. ‘Vik, listen, if he was crowded in one of the main holding cells with three hundred other men and he was injured, he would already be dead. Dead. He wouldn’t last a week.’

  Viktor appreciated the exaggeration, the statement made to jolt him out of himself, break the decay of his thinking – he needed these extremes of pronouncement.

  Towards Viktor, Louis was sincere; he could let his love flow without holding back or filtering in some prejudice. Viktor wished he did not feel the weight of gratitude or have to extend himself emotionally, to reach back in appreciation and enter into a complicated friendship of uneven exchange.

  Viktor saw a ruthless honesty in Louis’s relationship with Zimbabweans. There was no untruth, no farce of shared experience or connection. In daily conversations with security guards, taxi drivers and hawkers, Viktor engaged in a complicated game. His effort to see (and be seen) by the poor always descended into a travesty of smiles, fake bonhomie and mutual incomprehension – interests and desires that could never be shared. Louis, on the other hand, had realised that he could never be a friend to the hungry, so he did not try.

  Louis gave Viktor the same services he rendered to the campaign: he sourced US dollars at a UK exchange rate and provided water filters and food from his own home. Vicki and Louis packaged moussaka and souvlaki, tzatziki and taramasalata in Tupperware tubs. Every few weeks Viktor received packages, bundled up behind the counter and passed to him like contraband after a morning in the café: jams, pickles, clothes, imported cereals, foreign newspapers. And to Viktor’s surprise, Vicki and Louis accepted Anne-Marie without hesitation and treated her with the same generosity they bestowed on Viktor.

  *

  Nina sent Viktor emails, text messages, news posts. Anger that seemed to him pitiless, unending. He stood up to the fury, puffed out his chest and took it, absorbed the gusts of rage. But each time he received a message or an email, like a dart aimed for his heart, he was diminished. Weakened. His life shortened – how much can our soft, permeable bodies take? How much could he give?

  At Anne-Marie’s flat, or in Louis’s café, a cup of strong coffee next to his laptop, the saucer a lid sealing in the heat. His fingers spread across the base of the cup, stroking, petting the coffee as he waited for the screen to load, the icons to flicker into life. Viktor would open his email, sucking on the air, looking around the café at Louis to see if he was being watched – worried that the people near him would peer into his screen and see the chaos, the tragic mess of his desktop, and see that he was a man of failure, a farce.

  He told stories to strangers, taxi drivers, other customers, that he was married and had children – he doubled his failure with Rosa and created an entirely fresh fiction, that he had two girls. Two children. ‘It is so hard being away from them. My little girls. My wife is long-suffering, but I am working in Zimbabwe for several months – what can I do?’

  Hurried lies about the man he was, that he would never be. ‘I am a father of two. They are the apple of my eye. My wife is in London. I send money home.’ He would then show photos, if he was really going for it, even pass photos around – two images of Rosa, at two and six, his two girls – and receive a sweet charade. ‘She looks like you. The female version, of course. It must be hard, so hard, to be away.’ Viktor was showered in sympathy and in the clatter of compliments, the noisy nothings, he became, he imagined, more human. Even in the decay and mayhem of Zimbabwe, stripped of aberration and absurdity, he felt the need to be accepted.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Viktor imagined himself announcing, bowing, ‘allow me to introduce you to my two daughters, Rosa and Carla. I pick them up from school. I work tirelessly to provide. I would do anything for them. Such is my love – the love of a father for his family. I am a proud, simple man. An ox. A donkey. My wife cooks our meals. I provide. You see, all of you, I am a father, I am you. I have learnt my lessons well. I obey. I bow down. I marry. I reproduce. I suffer. I love.’

  Sliding the makeshift lid off the coffee, Viktor lifted the cup, still steaming, to his lips, his glasses fogged, and he sipped, pulling the froth through his teeth. The coffee slipped down his throat and worked quickly on him. His mouse hovered over the email from Nina; his heart hammered, beat to be let out of his chest so it could have its say. The email was headed Lies. Viktor closed his eyes briefly, tipped more coffee into his mouth, then opened his eyes and read:

  Viktor, you have taught Rosa how to make excuses – or to lie. I am trying to teach her to be scrupulously honest and open. You have corrupted our daughter and started to turn her into a dishonest and deceitful girl, in a word like you, like her father. I will not allow this to happen. I wish you peace, balance and harmony. N

  On other days the messages were even more truncated,
cryptic, mythical – prophesying doom, promising alignment with the planets, cosmic synchronisation, a route through life’s celestial ley lines. Contradictory, competing, ridiculous, the messages kept coming – vindictive, at peace, furious, in perfect balance, offering love, reconciliation, everything, nothing:

  Viktor, your photo is on my altar, forming part of the Circle of Perpetual Life. I am proud of our five years together, with all of its challenges, and I will be proud, I am sure, once more, of our friendship. I burn incense every night to cleanse our energy, to free you, to be free. N

  Two days later:

  Viktor, you are emotionally unavailable. I see from Facebook what you have been doing in Zimbabwe. Everywhere you go you ruin everything you touch, or come close to. And now you are giving yourself to the campaign to save someone, who, from what I can gather, you were responsible for putting in prison in the first place. Your life is a disaster. You do not deserve the love of your daughter. I have removed your photo from the altar. N

  A week afterwards peace and balance had returned, cosmic equilibrium – though the natural state of the universe was violent, unequal and indifferent. Nina sent Viktor his weekly horoscope:

  This week gets you back down to earth and into balance. Libra, you must slow down to allow for more cultivation of beauty and peace of mind. You have five planets in retrograde and this undeniable energy demands you slow down. The extreme energy of this alignment is confusing. Your ability to think clearly, with certainty, to the people near you, is impaired. In terms of making radical changes and releasing stubborn attachment you must exercise extreme caution. You must be honest about your feelings without resorting to passive aggression. Move forward cautiously, with prudence.