by Zeilig, Leo;
*
The night was warm and cheerful; it fell on Viktor as he left the building, landing on his shoulders, embracing him. He walked along Samora Machel Avenue. Unlit cars drove past, parting the night with the horn, words shouted from rolled-down windows. An occasional streetlamp shone orange; others stuttered, flashed, failed to catch and light.
Viktor had told Anne-Marie that he’d hail a taxi, that he understood that it wasn’t safe for him to walk. But what does it matter now? he thought. He started to run, leaping over the broken paving stones, two in each stride. The night blew against his face, filled his nostrils, dried his eyes. He wanted to shout, stand in the middle of the road, stop the kamikaze traffic and point to the light on the eighth-floor window of the bank in the distance, to the Professor-President, the hand of chinja, realpolitik, the lawyer-scientist-banker extraordinaire, and scream. He wanted to denounce, expose, bring Biko’s wrath on the very building. He wanted to light a fuse with the taxi drivers, the homeless families under the jacaranda trees in Harare Gardens, stand with them and see the building, with the Professor at the window, explode. He imagined the bloody monolith launched to the moon. He wanted to rub out his whiteness, work up his anger in the middle of the street, explain that X-Party and Y-Party were playing the same game. With no more supplication, no more excuses for his presence or apologies for his existence, he wanted to show Harare that everything needed to be remade. Erased and started again. Then, on Biko’s life, he would get everyone to swear that they would yield nothing. Never again would they give up a sliver of land to the white man or the nationalist, or give up hope to the intellectuals and the PhDs.
Viktor slowed to a trot, then to his normal, haggard, clumsy walk. Let the city come at me, take my clothes, call me brother. Desperate, breathless, Viktor dared Zimbabwe to throw its worst at him, heap whatever danger and despair it could muster and see him keep his footing.
Had no one ever told the Professor that he was a rotting, stinking carcass? The decay had been slow, but at some point the odour of his desiccating soul would have been unavoidable. Why didn’t anyone – a comrade, a friend, his wife, children – notice that the Prof-president-father-husband-lover-comrade stank? That the family could not finish their mealie-meal when he was in the room with that carrion odour that hung on him? Why had no one told him? When did it start? When he took the bank job to increase his Value Proposition to the Struggle? When he encouraged the students to come out for high principles and not populism? Hoping for a Sharpeville, a small massacre, so the West would bring down its righteousness and give Y-Party the moral prerogative? Had no one said to him, Comrade, I think you have lost your soul?
Viktor crossed Samora Machel and started to climb into the Avenues. He took his T-shirt off, walked bare-chested, and didn’t hear the catcalls, the whistling from the passing cars. The evening felt good against his chest. Why did someone not shake the Professor, take him by his neck, curl their hands around that thick throat and scare him when he refused to move his great mass, his weight, to save Biko? The hypocrisy! The Professor’s. His own. Why had someone not told Viktor that he was wrong? So wrong when he complained about Nina. When he told Isaac and Sonia about Nina’s latest denunciation. Why had no one told Nina? Called her off, told her to stop? When Viktor said he had to leave Nina and Rosa – why had no one spoken? This echo chamber. The general duplicity, a life sold in daily pieces to a chorus of approval, each voice agreeing, nodding, colluding. No one ever sounds the siren to our lies and self-deception, our selling out.
Viktor brought his ragged T-shirt to his head and mopped his brow. He turned into Tongogara and walked the few paces to the gate. What disturbed Viktor now was not the Professor’s refusal to help Biko, but the fear that his own life resembled ABO’s. That all lives do, eventually.
Part Six:
The Zimbabwean
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sometimes Viktor hired two computers and worked with Lenin and Stalin, side by side in Mandela’s Internet Café, dozens of tabs open on his laptop, each of his email accounts, a Skype call. Nelson was always in the background giving unruffled counsel.
From the MDC Viktor received the telephone number of the Police Commissioner, the British and American ambassadors, the mobile numbers and email addresses of the Chikurubi Prison. Once aroused from their stupor, the MDC quickly sank back into the quagmire of parliamentary privileges, the minor, pathetic concessions that the party had won from the regime it had been charged to unseat. Equipped with this information, Viktor had emailed the three thousand members of the Free Biko Campaign. Dutifully, following Viktor’s urgent prose, the prison and police chiefs received a deluge of calls and emails from Australia, South Africa, the UK, the US, Nigeria and South Africa.
Most callers stuck to Viktor’s script, written succinctly in his email and his Facebook posts, for the authorities to operate with good sense ‘and compassion, to release Biko and allow his friends to see him, for a doctor to give him a medical examination’. Some members of the campaign were more forthright, zealous, issuing threats of their own, warning the director of the prison, an old, weathered veteran of the war against Smith, that he would be held personally responsible if anything happened to Biko. One effusive caller from Maryland promised regime change and targeted bombings of State House and the director’s suburban mansion and swimming pool. ‘We know where you live and how to get you, man.’
*
Hopewell let out a low, rasping laugh. Biko brought the cup up to his mouth, rested it on Hopewell’s lower lip and levered in the water.
On the first night of Hopewell’s confinement, the exhaustion that sent him to the concrete bed, Biko and Samuel tried sleeping on the floor, but Hopewell shivered, his body already not completely his own, his legs and arms cramping, and in his half-sleep he’d cried out.
‘Com, this isn’t working.’ Samuel’s hushed voice woke Biko.
‘What should we do?’ Biko asked.
‘We need to rub him. It will help the cramping,’ Samuel said.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know. Come on.’
They sat at either end of the slab, Biko pressing Hopewell’s arms, Samuel kneading the calves. Hopewell sighed, sucked the air over his teeth, his clenched face relaxing. They continued in silence, sliding their hard-skinned hands over Hopewell’s legs and arms. The moonlight speckling the cell stretched their bodies onto the walls. Washed by the faint, dancing light, Hopewell’s extended limbs danced in the shadows. Biko thought of the heavy, inert arms of a puppet.
‘My eldest sister died,’ Samuel said. Biko looked up. ‘Her husband died three years later. One of her children died last year. My youngest sister in Durban is sick. I look after her children – well, I did. Another brother, Mike, died two years ago.’
‘An elder brother?’ Biko asked.
‘No, the same age.’
‘What?’
‘My twin.’
Biko was silent. He could do anything but this, these fireside chats about family, always the same – a list of the dead, his aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, comrades. Why didn’t Samuel shut up and keep his eyes fixed to the horizon? Mugabe would give them nothing; the waves that broke over the rocks would only concede to their will if they were as relentless and determined as the sea itself. The ocean obeyed the law of gravity, it was impervious to heartbreak and death, to Samuel’s storytelling about the dead. The goddamn useless, traitorous dead. Can’t you hear the ocean? Listen, listen, I can hear it roaring just outside our cell, outside the window in Durban, where your sister stays. Don’t you know the ocean doesn’t care that she’s dying and that her muscles tighten and cramp at night and keep her up, as she worries about her children in Bulawayo?
‘What about on your side?’ Samuel asked.
‘What?’ Biko answered dumbly.
‘Anyone gone to the three-letter curse?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aunts and uncles?’
‘Yes.�
�
‘Friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘Parents?’
Biko was silent again.
From that night on they slept on either side of Hopewell, holding him, pressing him together so his body, his legs, arms, hands, head did not come off in the night and the darkness could not claim him. In the morning they uncrossed their entwined limbs and checked that Hopewell was still alive, woke him, showed him the cell, the morning sun, indicated the inappropriate chirping birds outside the prison. Each sign a reason to hold on and to boast to the guards that they’d cheated the night once more through sheer will and comradeship, that they’d denied Mugabe another soul.
*
Anne-Marie had left early in the morning and came in late. She dropped her clothes silently to the floor, her bare feet sticking slightly to the tiles, peeling off quickly as she moved round the bed. Viktor pretended to sleep, pretended that he could sleep when she wasn’t in the bed. Her only words to Viktor when she left had been, ‘Don’t feed the bird. You are encouraging it.’
In the morning, Viktor thought, she will be gone, another Southern African tour for her NGO, another jamboree with donors in a downtown hotel. Anne-Marie had explained it all to him. The food lavish, the staff supine; only the colourful boubous, sandals, craft jewellery made with cowry shells distinguished their conventions, conferences and workshops from the corporate circuit when they took their turn at the Conference Trough in the Global South.
‘It’s a farce. I know it, but at least I can subvert some of their budget to real causes,’ Anne-Marie argued, her hands circling the air, excusing the excesses.
‘Maybe you’ll get too comfortable and you won’t want to leave,’ Viktor replied.
*
Nelson was always the most adamant; his arguments meant something. He didn’t speak, he argued. Life as polemic. Viktor heard him speaking to a young organiser for the group. The boy wore a stained, overlarge T-shirt that hung loosely over his skinny build. His alert eyes stared earnestly at Nelson.
‘You’re a good organiser, comrade, but you need to argue. You have to be hard and you have to go in to win. We’re not selling ice cream. Tinofanira kurwisa uye tinofanira kukunda shamwari yangu.’
When the boy was gone, rushing out with the gift of renewed energy, Nelson sighed deeply and dropped his face into his cupped hands, letting his dreadlocks fall over his arms. ‘Was I too hard on him, Vik?’
‘I liked the line about ice cream.’
‘So I was too hard?’
‘I don’t know,’ Viktor answered, pleased to be asked. ‘Maybe you were. Does it matter that he wins the argument every time?’
Nelson’s mouth opened to a smile. ‘Of course it does. You know, I don’t even think we have to win the argument to stop Mugabe and his thugs. They are puny compared to your lot, the class of murderers you face in the UK. That sophisticated game of hide and seek you play in the Global North. You know what got me? The first war in the Gulf in 1991. The US assembles an army of 250,000 in the Middle East in two weeks to take back their oil, and I thought, They won’t hesitate to move against us if it’s ever necessary.’ Nelson had stood up. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead. His voice was low. He turned to Viktor, chopping the space in front of him, out of rhythm with his words. He means it, Viktor thought. He always means what he says. ‘We need to win the argument. We need to be stronger,’ Nelson concluded.
‘Form is important, too, Nelson,’ Viktor said. ‘It matters how we speak. How we leave people feeling.’
‘You’re a liberal, an ice-cream seller too. But we need to be a piston box, Viktor, and piston boxes aren’t pretty.’ He rubbed his face vigorously, fell into the chair again, took out a pen and on a scrap of paper, leaning on his thigh, he started to draw.
‘This, comrade,’ he said eventually, holding the torn page aloft, ‘is what a piston box looks like. It only moves if steam is pushed quickly through it. Then the piston rod moves through the cylinder cover. See? The cylinder cover provides a box to prevent the leakage of steam, to drive the rod. Do you see?’ Nelson pointed to his surprisingly detailed diagram, to the arrows on the page. ‘The steam is the people, the workers, the poor,’ he said, dropping the page. ‘They are the movement. But without the cylinder cover, the steam disperses and the piston rod doesn’t move. We have to win the argument, Viktor. Build the piston box. Do you see?’
The memory had erupted over him like a party streamer, a gash of colour and chaos.
Viktor rolled onto his back. The morning, in its blind hope, was beginning to squawk. The rooster – Mobutu, Nelson called him – who inhabited the walkway between the flats and each day cleared a path with his feathered chest had begun his morning chorus.
Viktor could picture it all, this city that was no longer really a city, recolonised by the countryside, the rural areas and cockerels. It was Mobutu, not Mugabe, who really held power in Zimbabwe.
‘We need to know you are going to stay, that we can rely on you. I’m not saying to burn your passport, never to return, but rather make a decision to stay here with us, with the group. Commit to us, Viktor.’ Anne-Marie had delivered this speech as Viktor pulled up his trousers, balancing on the end of the bed. Anne-Marie stood in the doorway, dressed up for meetings, her hair tied back.
‘Do you mean us?’ he asked.
‘No. This. Commit to this.’ She opened her hands, unfolded her arms.
‘I see.’ Though hurt, he knew she was right.
‘Okay, yes, us as well. But they are the same thing, the bigger us: Biko, Nelson, the students.’
Mobutu shrieked outside the front door. Get up, Viktor! Wake up, you lazy white man! Viktor pulled himself up, the sheet sticking to him, and fumbled in the half-light for his sandals.
There was Rosa’s name, he thought, I argued that we should call her Rosa. I won that argument. I committed to that.
Viktor walked stiffly to the kitchen, his back painful from the night. The thin, foam mattress, that he had already replaced, his immobile body marked out on the bed, the hard wood boards, pressed against him. He stretched, lifting his arms, his fingers grazing the ceiling.
Mobutu squawked and scratched at the door. Barely conscious, Viktor dropped his hand into the bag, fingered two slices of white bread, closed his hand around them. He walked to the door. Mobutu was tapping now in even, repetitive intervals. The morning feed generated no affection for Viktor; quite the opposite, it seemed. Mobutu had become adamant and expectant – when he saw Viktor in the afternoon he spread his decorative, useless wings and ran towards him screaming. I feed him and he doesn’t like me. If I don’t feed him, he’ll try to kill me. I can’t fucking win. Viktor opened the door wide enough to push his hand through and he sprinkled the doorstep with the dough and crusts. Mobutu, as usual, thrust his head through the door and rattled his red, spotted jowls.
Viktor showered. It was always the first part of the morning that didn’t feel like he was running on automatic.
‘We should call her Rosa. After Rosa Luxemburg,’ he’d said to Nina.
‘No, she needs her own name, not a character from your PhD,’ Nina had answered.
‘Rosa is not a character in my PhD, she was a Polish-German Jewish revolutionary. She was killed in 1919 by the Freikorps, the forerunners of the Nazis.’
‘Great!’
So for ten days Rosa was known as ‘the baby’ or ‘the little one’, nameless and bleary-eyed, until Viktor won the Naming Dispute and set his daughter up for a lifetime of political failure and murder. Her fogged and translucent eyes in those first weeks stared through everything, but to Viktor she only seemed to focus when her name was finally agreed upon. At last she could see the world, pin down the flat and her parents. The name Rosa anchored his daughter, declared that she belonged, and could no longer float above them noisily in those early post-birth, maybe days. Rosa had arrived.
Viktor soaped himself, the water turning hot and cold, forcing him to step away from the shower
head to froth the soap, coat his back, chest, penis with the suds, then step back into the water to wash off the lather.
He found his way back to Nina and pictured her in bed, smiling at him, dripping wet from the shower.
‘Okay, darling, we’ll call her Rosa,’ she’d said finally, ‘but don’t mention the murder until she’s grown up.’
Viktor had dropped the towel, thrown himself on the bed and kissed her.
Viktor heard Mobutu again in the corridor, full from his morning meal but still complaining. He felt a pain in his own head from the noise of all his memories; he wanted silence. My head is a forest of wild birds, living and dead, he thought.
After the shower he dried himself following the methodical regime his mother had taught him. ‘Don’t leave any part of your body wet when you leave the bathroom, sweetie, or you’ll catch cold.’ He dug his fingers into the towel as he rubbed his head dry of water. He pulled the towel back, dragging his hair flat against his forehead, his receding hairline.
He needed to get out of the flat. He’d heard that Biko and his cell-mates were being transfered and he wanted to be there, with the others, to show him that he had witnessed the violence, that he knew the name of the Master of Ceremonies, that he had felt Hitler’s hand on his own groin, witnessed his friend experiencing the Bulawayo Treatment. Make it wet. Make it wet. Viktor grimaced at the memory.
He chased away the guilt wrapping itself around his guts. He saw himself, his face twisted in the mirror, and he turned away. A biblical sacrifice, all that laconic dialogue, those barked orders and brutality. Viktor had seen the deep state, the abuses that the NGOs spoke about, the impunity of ZANU-PF that the UK government listed as they deported Zimbabweans back to the jails and prisons.
Viktor rushed through the final stages of his ablutions and dropped the towel on the floor, leaving watery footprints on his way to the kitchen.
Mobutu started up again. Fuck that bird, he thought, so goddamn ungrateful. If it wasn’t for me you’d be a sickly, scrawny vagrant or dead, bony, meatless addition to someone’s sadza.