by Zeilig, Leo;
*
Viktor and Anne-Marie decided, in the hot, harsh sun, to swim. Viktor drove down Sam Nujoma onto Central Avenue, followed the traffic curving around the National Art Gallery. He saw the sign for Les Brown. A strange name for a Smith-era Olympic-sized swimming pool with high concrete diving boards. Viktor turned the car to the pavement, slowed, straining with the heavy steering. Anne-Marie opened the boot, dropped her handbag in and removed the towel. They tapped on the clouded glass of the ticket office until an old man appeared and punched the price into the till. Two thin rectangular tickets flew out and skidded across the counter.
The pool was deserted. The sun was retreating across the water in a wavering, uncertain line, the stands on one side of the pool ascending with green-painted benches. Around the pool were palms that jostled noisily in the wind. When Viktor and Anne-Marie entered, the entire complex looked untouched, the clear water unpolluted by bodies, the infrastructure intact. The poolscape was a relic of the whites-only colonial world, bereft of people, life, Zimbabwe. In this ruined city, the pool, the afternoon, was timeless. Only the shower room – a cavernous, subterranean chamber under the stalls, loose pipes without showerheads hanging onto the crumbling walls – placed the watery colosseum into its correct context. On close inspection, the spread of gentle ruin overhung the place.
The couple undressed, draping their clothes over a bench. Anne-Marie wriggled out of her dress, tugging it free of her curves until she stood in her bra and panties. Viktor folded each of his clothes carefully, placing one item on the other as he always did, as Isaac did. Anne-Marie stared at the cloth pyramid resting on the bench, the trousers, the shirt, the vest – he was the only man in Zimbabwe who wore a vest – his clothes organised by size, arranged on top of his shoes. She liked his scrupulous ordering, the lists he wrote in bed in the evening, his towering, leaning frame bent in permanent supplication, in apology for his unusual presence, for his disposition. She loved him for his peculiarities and she wanted him.
Silently Anne-Marie laid a towel on the concrete floor, unhooked her bra, squeezed her two thumbs into the sides of her panties and lowered them. Viktor looked at her, surprised, and she smiled slyly and knelt. Lying on her back on the towel, she licked the tips of her fingers, brought them between her legs and started to move her hand in slow circles. Her feet were flat on the floor, her body open, expectant, as though she was reaching for something above the ground, in the stuffy, heated air. She moaned loudly, opened her eyes, searched for Viktor. He looked around cautiously, worried, then gave in, lowered his shorts, dropped to the hard concrete floor and Anne-Marie’s soft body.
Viktor entered her. He inhaled her smell, her sweet, salty sweat that sealed their naked bodies together. The smell of her flat, the bed they shared. Viktor had the sensation, barely formed, that their lives had started to bleed into each other. She whispered instructions. ‘Slower. Kiss my neck, kiss me.’ Together the defined lines of their individual lives, their separate plans, had started to loosen around them.
Anne-Marie came first, turning her mouth from his to gasp. She raised herself, arching into him, then shuddered slightly. Viktor withdrew and released short, urgent jets of come that stood out on the dark skin of her stomach and breasts. Viktor looked away and tried to lift a corner of the towel they lay on, to clean her. ‘No, leave it. Lie on me, mudiwa. Don’t move away.’ Viktor wanted to get up, clean them, wash off their lovemaking with the shower in the corner of the room.
As they lay together Anne-Marie said, ‘You always want what you can’t have.’
‘What do you mean?’
She crossed one leg over his. ‘And when you have it you don’t want it any more, or you want something else. Always unsatisfied, always striving.’
‘That’s not true. I want you. I want Biko to be freed.’
‘I just don’t know whether you’ll ever be happy with me.’
‘That’s not true,’ Viktor protested.
‘Isn’t it? If I was to draw a picture of your life, there would be a trail of all the things you’ve left incomplete. The PhD, your journalism, Rosa, Rosa’s mother, your parents, your politics.’
‘Anne-Marie, why are you saying this?’
‘Next you’ll tell me you want to be a novelist, and after you have written your first novel, that you want to be an opera singer. Am I right?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think I can ever please you. Come on, let’s swim.’
*
It seemed to Viktor a pity to break the water. The wind was gently blowing and rippling the surface. The stillness of the pool, of the whole complex of old concrete and ageing grandeur, calmed him. The banks of seats surrounding the pool amplified their voices, turned their whispers into declarations.
Anne-Marie lowered herself into the water from the steel ladder, her straight, long calves and thighs spreading. She had tied her plaits in a knot on top of her head; she kept her head out of the water as she swam.
Viktor walked to the far end of the pool, which was still in the sun’s blaze. When Anne-Marie could see him, he dived into the water. He surfaced into the light. Without his glasses he strained to see. His chest hurt; a sharp pain pulsed along his sternum. He breathed deeply, stood on his pointed feet, balanced on his toes. The awful tragedy is that I am made up of bone and flesh, two large pumping lungs, an intricate, vulnerable system of veins, capillaries, organs. Our entire, fleshy, moist life is a sort of travesty. He thought of Biko’s pathetic flesh, its inadequate defence against police truncheon and gun, his developed consciousness encased inside such a brittle frame. There was something about this that seemed wrong, a failure of evolution to build a more rigorous, determined crust, a surer hold against mortality. Viktor rotated in the water, kept his legs and arms moving, his face raised to the waning sun. We need a firmer defence against oppression. After all, how long has our species had to evolve a defensive shell, develop an organism immune to torture and inhumanity? How many millennia of oppression have we suffered?
Anne-Marie swam an Olympic length. Then, shivering, she pulled herself from the water and lay on the side of the pool in the sun, an arm over the edge, her hand immersed in the chilled water. Viktor swam to her, hauled himself out of the water and sat next to her, embracing his bent legs.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say those things,’ Anne-Marie said, her eyes closed.
‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘Don’t agree with me, Viktor. I don’t want to be right. I need you to contradict me.’ Anne-Marie turned to her side and supported her head on her bent arm. The imprint of the paving stones marked her back, pressing hieroglyphics into her flesh. ‘Sorry I said those things,’ she said again.
‘Don’t be. Don’t.’
‘Stop telling me I’m wrong to apologise, mudiwa.’
‘Okay, I won’t speak. You speak, sweetie, and I’ll listen.’
Anne-Marie was the most certain, clear-headed person he knew. Her life was ordered. The things she set out to do each day were actually completed. In her own way she was sure of herself and her commitments to small acts, saving Zimbabwe, the Congo, one soul at a time. To Viktor she seemed to amplify before him; her worthiness eclipsed him. Her proportions seemed magnified against his weaknesses and deficiencies; to Viktor’s moral crisis, his total failure of self-assurance, she hastened and overcame. Anne-Marie broke over the world volubly and mastered herself.
The water turned her impromptu swimwear translucent. The triangle of black hair was visible through her panties. Her nipples, cold and erect, protruded through the bra, the small, alert granules of skin traced through the material. Just minutes ago all of his energy had been directed to her, yet he felt the certainty of desire again and craved the clarity of her body, the self-assurance of their lovemaking.
‘I want us to make a trip to Kinshasa when Biko is released, before you leave.’
Viktor was surprised. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘I need you to do certain t
hings first. I want you to meet my grandmother.’
‘Your grandfather’s wife?’
‘Yes, Patrice’s wife, who else? She’s the most determined, stubborn woman I know. She’s not political, not in a Zimbabwean way, but she has a keener feeling for people than anyone I know.’
‘It sounds like a test. A Lumumba exam.’
‘Maybe.’
Maybe? What was this? Anne-Marie never lingered on conditional adverbs or sought what she did not have. Instead she complained about fake prophets and flabby reasoning. Torture would not yield disappointment in Anne-Marie. She sat up, adjusted her position on the towel and hunched, like Viktor, over her knees, the sun on her back.
‘I am taking a terrible risk talking to you like this. I don’t want what I am going to say to sound like an ultimatum. It’s not. I don’t even want you to answer now. Not today.’ Viktor was silent. They had been so free from introspection and doubt; their relationship had occupied an unusual, unknown place of simple, unequivocal presence. He didn’t want this disturbed. ‘Chéri, when I saw you today by the car outside my office, I thought just for a second that there would never be a time when you would be completely here, without some agitated, second thought.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ Viktor replied nervously. ‘How can I be anywhere, exactly, when Biko’s still in jail? Can’t we go home? Talk about this after we’ve eaten?’
‘You need to surrender to something. Not to me, necessarily, but to something. I felt you were beginning to do that, starting at last to give in. But I need to know you’re ready.’
‘For what?’
‘For life, Viktor. This. Zimbabwe. Harare. Biko. Us. Me and you. Otherwise you will run away again, on your UK passport, like another expat on an African mission. I need to know that you won’t get out and leave all of us hanging. It doesn’t have to be here, but once you’ve decided, you must stay. What good are you to the world, to Biko, to your daughter, otherwise? There are battles to be had. There are people who need you.’
Viktor turned to the pool, lowered his feet into the water and stared into the grainy, descending dusk, the waning sun. He realised then what he had only indistinctly known before: that he had always failed to be what people wanted. Worse even than never entirely pleasing anyone, with his episodic commitment he raised expectations and then dashed them. If he had only been with Rosa, then at least he would be known for his dogged fathering. If he had simply dug in his heels at work and become a trusted comrade to Moreblessing and Tendai and Patience. I have never quite managed to be a single thing. Viktor summoned the image of Biko and his one-man war on society, the dictatorship, on Mugabe and his jackals: Biko’s great arc of commitment to life.
‘Why are you crying?’ Anne-Marie asked.
Viktor rubbed his eyes roughly. ‘I’m not,’ he said.
‘I just want you to listen to me, then we’ll go home and you can have dinner.’
‘I am listening, mudiwa.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Three weeks after Hopewell had collapsed, he lay each day motionless. Biko and Samuel could function in the cell with their eyes closed. Three steps to the bucket by the toilet, the plastic cup bobbing on the water. Two steps to the bed. Biko raised himself from his position against the wall, his large hands cupped round Hopewell’s head to pour the water into his mouth. Two steps back; the green plastic cup dropped again into the bucket of water. Three and a half steps to the door to stretch in the early, lightless morning, two fists hammering against the rusted door to wake the prison. From the door, one step to the centre of the cell and to their whole miniature universe, their constellation.
Despite his protests and midday sermons, delivered at the allotted hour one step from the iron prison door, Hopewell’s will to death was stronger than Biko’s to life.
‘So, comrades, to summarise, we must take the war to X-Party like we did in 1996 to 1998: strikes, demonstrations, the war veterans marching with us, not against us. The turmoil across all layers, in the city, towns, the village, each following our lead.’ Samuel and Hopewell stared at Biko, his arms fanning the room. His hands seemed to throw punctuation out of an invisible hat – exclamation points and question marks, hyphens, semicolons marking up his speech, his finger pointed towards his audience – a full stop, a pause, a deep breath, then a statement. ‘Leave X- and Y-Party no rest!’ His right index finger pointed to the ceiling in exclamation, to harass them, cut off their oxygen. His full hand open, the sentence unfinished, semicolon. ‘Let us take the offensive.’ One finger, full stop. ‘Our mission, brothers,’ pause, colon. ‘To open a new front. Choke the regime from the south and north.’ Another pause, his finger dotting the space in front of him. ‘Bring our cadre, our activists from Bulawayo, infiltrate and stir up the population of Mutare, the Eastern Highlands.’ Two hands up, his palms facing the men, semicolon. ‘We must spread Zimbabwe across Africa, take Africa to Zimbabwe. The mighty Southern African working class will rise again.’ Another pause. ‘Across the deserts of the North and South, the Great Lakes, across the continent, bring out, infiltrate the north, to Algeria on the Mediterranean and Johannesburg and Durban in the south. Create a great, restless march of the poor, slum dwellers, the workers, shake the whole land without end, beyond the horizon, spread out over each country, across every border.’
Then the staccato finish, two fists hammering the words out like pistons: ‘We’ll wear out their borders, the nations that divide us, grind our enemies into the earth, bring Africa together, create the continent as one land, one struggle, one people.’ Suddenly a pause and a sub-clause. ‘Are you listening, brothers?’ Open-mouthed, Hopewell and Samuel nodded. ‘We will take the absurd, the impossible, strike it in every direction and cast the entire continent into the war.’ Then, shouting, ‘For life and light against their night!’
Exhausted, Biko finished. He dropped his hands and seemed to break down. Despite his stubborn, repetitive resolve, his prison ideology, he couldn’t halt Hopewell’s decline. The guillotine fell from a distance high above the prison, the patch of sky over Zimbabwe, over the continent.
At night Samuel and Biko donated their flesh and muscles and the three men lay together, Hopewell cushioned in the odd configuration of limbs pressed around him. The cell vibrated to Samuel’s uneven snoring. Biko’s head rested on his arm, his face inches from the back of Hopewell’s neck. He placed his free hand on Hopewell’s back and felt the struggle in his chest, his wet, choked lungs, his ribbed frame slowly surrendering. Biko couldn’t sleep. He needed to witness Hopewell, keep him with them by the simple act of observation. He rested his hand on Hopewell’s cheek, felt the lolling of his friend’s head.
*
Anne-Marie would be pleased with him, with the sleep that came on her instruction and wasn’t disturbed by his body constantly trying to find a position, a place, where he might find sleep. Even these drugs were a solution of sorts; she’d understand the concrete steps he’d taken to quiet his mind, to stop the images of the truncheon, the sounds of Biko’s pain, the feeling of Hitler’s hands cupping his face to make him watch.
Viktor opened the top drawer in the bedroom chest of drawers, where she’d cleared her skirts and shirts that he had ironed and arranged, the only statement of his love Viktor thought she’d really allowed them. In many ways she was so organised, her sense of what was important worked out with no ambiguity. The way she’d declared his presence in her life, matter-of-fact, announcing to her friends that they were together, telling the comrades – and Nelson – that the group could use their flat. Viktor had proved himself incapable of clear, decisive action, but it didn’t matter, because Anne-Marie could do it for them both, order his life, arrange their lives in Zimbabwe. He would offer his hands for the folding, the scrubbing, the washing-up, a pantomime of action that required no real thought or commitment.
The bedroom was in chaos, the cover on the bed crumpled, the sheets pulled away from the mattress, clothes scattered on the floor. Viktor drop
ped the box of pills into the drawer; a corner of a photo was visible under a mess of T-shirts. He pulled it out.
He was sitting on a bench with Rosa pressed against his chest. She looked grown-up, as she would look for the rest of her life, her face slightly tense, weary, staring into the distance. His face too, like his daughter’s, looked unsettled; he was staring down at her. Nina had taken the photo at the end of the day, after the rides they’d all shared at the fairground, the miniature train they had taken over and over again till they were exhausted and penniless, Rosa riding between them, crying out for more. Their indulgence had been endless that day.
Holding the photo, Viktor sat heavily on the bed. He looked into Rosa’s distant eyes. The tears were still there, his words of reassurance to the sudden desperate sadness that had engulfed her, as great as the joy seconds before, on their last circuit of the train. ‘You know, sweetheart,’ he’d said, ‘if we have another go on the train, that’ll use up our bus fare and we’ll have to walk, and I can’t carry you any more. You’re too big now. You’ll have to walk.’
It had been her choice – as everything was that day – so they rode the train one last time. Then, as they walked away from the fair – for a few seconds they even skipped together, all of them, Rosa holding Viktor and Nina’s hands, she suddenly started to cry loudly, looking back to the coloured lights as the rides spun, turned and sparkled in the dusk. Viktor, bending down to her height, held her in his arms, then lifted her up and walked to a bench and sat down with her, whispering into her ear until her tears slowed, her loud, breathless sobs softened. ‘Darling, it’s okay. There’ll be many fairs. When you’re bigger we’ll ride together on the Big Wheel right up in the sky. I promise. That’s what we’ll do.’ He had repeated these words over and over until her gulping, heaving chest had slowed and she rested against his neck. And then Nina had taken the photo.
Viktor looked again at the photo. Rosa’s frozen, sad face was caught, he fancied, in her first hideous realisation that everything comes to an end. The fair, the skipping, the weekend, the loving, the momentary truce between her parents; their joy and her tears, he thought, came from the inevitable, awful conclusion that every pleasure ends just when it has started.