by Zeilig, Leo;
More perplexing even than the destruction, the deposit on the desk, was the reaction of Nelson, Lenin, Stalin and the others. The human inventory of suffering from the beating yesterday was relatively slight: two broken arms, some bruised and broken ribs and several bloodied noses and heads on the side of the demonstrators; two soldiers had been hospitalised, one from a head injury. No arrests. Violence is not blind; it does know limits. The instructions had been to clear the prison: teach the people a lesson, but don’t give them any more martyrs.
Lenin was the first to stand; he walked to Viktor, who stood in a diagonal strip of light. Lenin bent, picked up two pieces of card, scraped the excrement into the cardboard shovel and walked outside. The others stayed hunched on the floor.
‘How’s Anne-Marie?’ Nelson asked, without lifting his head.
‘Bruised and angry but fine, thanks to Lenin. We can get this material replaced.’
No one spoke. Viktor tried again. ‘We can ask for donations. We’ll have the money by the end of the week.’
Still there was no comment.
‘At least we got off yesterday. What is this, anyway? Just broken objects. Just stuff. Not people.’
All the heads came up to look at Viktor. ‘What?’ he exclaimed.
‘Spoken like a true Westerner,’ Nelson replied curtly.
‘Okay, this is not good, but it can be replaced.’ Viktor sounded defensive.
‘That is not the point.’ Nelson stood, steadied himself on the wall. ‘As a small organisation we have built our office over years. These things, the desk, the computer, the photos, our archive, are important. We are poor people, Viktor. What we have lost cannot be replaced. We are not an NGO; we’re a small, stubborn piston box, built by our efforts. That, that’ – Nelson breathed heavily and indicated with his head the broken Gestetner mimeograph machine – ‘took us two years to buy, two years of steady fundraising. In the first week we produced the leaflet for the 1998 bread riots. Each paper was printed on that, as you say, object. Objects are important, comrade – our people don’t have enough objects.’ Nelson couldn’t bring himself to turn and address the destroyed machine directly, to look at this inanimate comrade and assess whether it needed to be thrown away, whether anything could be salvaged.
Slowly the others stood and started to gather the fragments of paper, wood, search for bricks that could level the desk, improvise repairs on the benches. Viktor unhooked his laptop bag from his shoulder, rested it against the wall and rolled up his sleeves. Then he lifted the computer from the floor, swept the glass with his foot into an open newspaper, turned the ends over, folded the parcel, left the office. Even though he couldn’t see, his eyes blinded by the midday sun, he knew the way, the number of steps, the width of the path, the exact place of the bin.
*
‘Samuel, get the fucking guards.’
Samuel woke, stumbled, staggered to the door. He hit it first with a hand, then with both fists. ‘Hopewell’s dying! Call a doctor,’ he screamed. ‘Open this bloody door! Vhurai chigonhi ichi.’
Hopewell strained and looked up at the cell, then fell back. The bars on the window cast shadows across the small room. Samuel hammered on the door. Other prisoners started to stir and join the shouting over and over again. ‘Open the door!’ Samuel repeated, tired now, on his knees, panting.
The corridor shook as each cell stirred and the shouts combined with others, turning the whole prison into a metal and flesh orchestra. Voice and iron screamed, sang out. Each of them, every man, every prisoner with his own fury and grief, trying to bring back their dead.
Biko sat over Hopewell, his hand pummelling his comrade’s chest, beseeching him with each blow to breathe, to focus on the light, see it filling the cell. Samuel moved from the door and came to the bed. He looked down at Hopewell and put a hand on Biko’s shoulder. ‘He’s gone, Biko. Hopewell has passed over. Let him be now. Let him have his peace.’
Biko covered his face with his hands, jerked his shoulder free of Samuel and sniffed in his tears, extinguished them, clenched his muscles and brought his body and his spinning head under control. He got up and took Samuel’s place by the door. In his father’s deep voice he shouted, ‘Hopewell’s gone. We remain resolute. Fight on, comrades! Shinga Mushandi Shinga! Qina Msebenzi Qina!’
The corridor, the line of cells, each woken prisoner took up the new chant. ‘Hatidzokeri shure, tinonoramba tichirwisa!’ Samuel dropped his hands to Hopewell’s face and dragged his fingers across his alert, surprised eyes, whispering a short prayer. With his hand still on his brother’s face he thought that they must prepare the body, wash him as best they could with what they had.
Part Seven:
Crocuses
Chapter Thirty-Six
During the early spring months in Harare the heat was relentless, burning away thoughts as soon as they’d formed, sending his daughter, phoenix-like, into the sky in a spiral of vapour. As the weeks and months passed, the clear lines, the colours and smells of Rosa began to fade for Viktor.
He had been keeping a diary for her, describing to her the parrots that are common in Harare.
Like pigeons in London, sweetheart, and boy do they squawk. They gather in the park I walk to every day on my way to the café. They own certain trees and crowd the branches; their bright green bodies decorate the park. They are bad-tempered birds, jostling each other out of position, moving sidewards along the branches, pecking and screaming at each other.
And then, then, sweetheart, on other trees there is the strangest fruit, but you have to watch carefully, stand in the shade – it gets hot here early and in the open if you stand for too long you get the straight blows of the sun. It took me a few days before I realised that this black, heavy fruit hanging off the trees was in fact bats. Giant sleeping bats, hundreds of them, literally, growing out of the tree, blocking the sun. Under these trees it is always dark, an odd, made-up night in the bright, hot day. Isn’t that strange? I think they look like Isaac, your grandfather, when he’s outside in the winter, holding his coat around him for warmth.
At night the park comes alive. (I never walk through it, though not because of the bats.) You see their shapes crowding the clear night sky like black kites. The parrots and bats keep to separate trees. I’ve never seen them together. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could see these birds together, even at night? I would hold your hand so you wouldn’t get scared.
Like this, in the evening, Viktor would write stories from Zimbabwe in his Rosa book: what he’d seen, who he’d spoken to, what he was doing.
You know that one of my friends isn’t very nice? How peculiar people are. Remember the accident I saw when I arrived? Well, this little angry man who has hair growing up his neck and has big muscles on his arms actually tried to save people’s lives. I have seen him carry two big children in each arm and not even break a sweat. He has his own coffee shop and he invites your father for meals in his house, which has a swimming pool. But he shouts and says horrible things to the people who work for him. Strange.
Viktor stopped. I can’t write this, it’s not appropriate. I don’t know how to write any more to my daughter. I never did. I never knew how to speak to her. Nina was right, I was never a good father.
But when he tried to resurrect Rosa in the evening, bring her to life, teleport her into the flat he shared with Anne-Marie, she started to resist, stayed more firmly in London. She held on as he attempted to drag her across the continent, over the deserts of North Africa to the south. The carpet where she stood in London bunched up in cloth waves against her heels, her toes tipped up, her eyes moist – she didn’t want to come. Before long Rosa’s book, as Viktor’s stay lengthened, was opened only three times a week, twice, soon only once, then only when he managed to grip Rosa in his arms, wrap his arms around her waist, pull her quickly into him.
Five months after arriving, one night he opened the book, the scraps, leaves, unsent postcards, photographs he’d printed for her – Louis with his wife Vic
ki, Viktor between them in his long swimming shorts, his white body like a superimposed figure. There were torn pages, napkins with drawings and stories.
The contents of the scrapbook spilled over the bed and floor of the darkened flat, fragments of the story, the family scattered and humourless. My girl. My loss. My pathetic jokes. My daughter on a bloody napkin. Did you hear that? My daughter lives on napkins.
‘Daddy, do you love me? Do you love Mummy? Why don’t you marry Mummy and come and live with us? Why have you been away for so long? You have been away for ages.’
Viktor started to sweep the pages of the story, the scraps, with his feet.
He knelt and scooped up the loose pages, napkins, cards, and kneaded them together in his palms. All nonsense. These line drawings, in green, blue and black ink to show Rosa and to make her laugh, all now howling at him, piercing his ears with laughter.
Yet when he lifted the ball of papers in his perspiring hands, all he could hear were tears so loud he thought his comrades would hear, that Anne-Marie returning early from work would enter the flat and hear his sobs.
*
Dear Viktor,
We have raised more money, filled buckets for Biko, squeezed the suits and the junior academics to pay out to the struggle you are waging in Zimbabwe, to give if they can’t act. The money has been deposited in the campaign account.
Now tonight what I want to say to you is that the individual DOES count. Biko. You. Mohamed Bouazizi’s mother in Tunisia. It’s teasing those hidden, latent talents and genius out of them, including wild, passionate anger, heroism, courage beyond belief, that can and does change a court case, a community, a town, a country and an epoch. Now tell the comrades this, they must feel the waves rippling across the continent from the North, the seismic struggles breaking up the earth’s crust. The old is dying. The new is being born.
Did I tell you before about Bouazizi who set himself on fire after his fruit stall was confiscated by the police in Sidi Bouzid? Well, his mother became half-conscious of her own agency when she’d screamed abuse at the police and party HQ for about a whole half-hour. She was losing her voice and turned on the thousand workers and shouted, ‘YOU! CALL YOURSELVES MEN! HUH? JUST STANDING THERE DOING NOTHING!’ She held up her son’s ashes. ‘I WANT JUSTICE FOR HIM, ME, ALL OF US.’
Then a boy worker held up bananas – what Bouazizi had been selling and what the police confiscated, his only income. Then a shaven-headed worker near the front started punching the air and shouted. Others closed up towards him, moving forward. One woman, a boy worker, a man, his workmates and shop-bench mates, maybe twenty, then fifty, then one hundred, closing up around the mother. She’s newly emboldened and now faces the cops and thugs again and starts copying the worker who punched his fist in the air. And now she’s leading the chants and it’s hundreds, then a thousand or so, chanting – then it cuts dead.
This is how it all started and how it can start in Zimbabwe.
Within an hour, the next video shows, a dozen of the same men have gone to the nearby bigger industrial town, low talk, telling the details to a rapt audience, but interrupted by an occasional chant as people who’ve never dared chant show off. And after all the new guys have heard the story with solemn faces, nervously they all start joining in the chanting! Two towns united. From mother to boy worker to another town, to the country, to the region and continent. From mother to the world.
Think about it, my friend. A powder keg is talking to you: he’s called Biko, BIKO. The tyrant Mugabe lit the keg when he arrested our comrades, when he almost killed Biko with his beatings. There in Southern Africa it’s public property, everyone knows, and we are making sure people know his name here too. Soon the streets of London and Europe will echo to cries of Biko.
Bouazizi woke up his mother and all of Sidi-Bouzid with her, ensuring every last worker heard her screaming wails of mourning.
Remember this, Viktor: fear is no longer an absolute. A generation of young fighters has made every one of the 500 words for fear in Africa RELATIVE.
I’m so tired this is probably rambling nonsense. I spent the day arguing with the ignorant, deluded, middle management at the university in this City of Darkness, this hell on earth. Sorry, very sorry. I just want to help. I know Biko so well. Tell him, if you see him, that I am with him, that I think about him always. That we are all with him.
Tendai
*
All this willing and wishing of time on and on, beyond the tasks of today, left Viktor reeling. And sure enough, the day would pass and he would stare back, giddy, and feel bereft at the lost time that he had just wished over. If he tried, his eyes shut, he could see everything, his whole near future – the scene outside the crematoria, his sister’s night-time call about his mother or father, about the fall, the accident, the death. The blowy, downcast day would be clogged as usual with clouds, heads bowed, his parents dead. There was a brutal, dreadful truth in his relationship with time.
Though Viktor’s faith in social media was waning, he still believed Biko could be saved online, that his hashtag campaign would make the difference. This was something that had changed the fate of global action, that the comrades, the old-style fighters Viktor had met, Tendai, Nelson, did not completely understand – the great proletarian massification, the democratisation of the internet. Now, with a bank of phones, a few computer activists in Zimbabwe, in the Congo, in the UK, France, no matter what bloody country, rich or poor, Biko could be saved, crimes exposed, death denied.
Viktor muttered low caffeine curses to himself, his fingers lethargic in the morning, hitting the wrong keys. He would raise the profile of the campaign, lift Biko, hold him aloft on these bent, typing fingers, these clawed hands, punching letters and numbers into phones, keyboards, screens. Biko would be saved by the new revolution. Don’t hide from it, Anne-Marie. Open your eyes, Nelson.
The days were still short in the early spring the sun intense, the open skies broad; the sun retreated quickly, took its night-time rest in the late afternoon and, recharged, occupied the sky again in the early morning as Viktor laboured on with the campaign.
Viktor sat at the gate. He borrowed a plastic chair that bowed under his weight, the legs widening on the ground. The late-afternoon sun was dying quickly, but its weak, rose-coloured glow reached Viktor and the guard, Lancelot. The two men basked and stretched, craning their faces to the sky, to the crimson, freckled sun holding its position above the tall pines in the distance that ringed Mugabe’s palace. The setting daylight cast the trees, lamp-posts and passing cars into languid, long, quivering shadows – the city traffic was quiet, the dog-eared trees marked out on the road. Viktor saw neighbours pass through the gate, people he knew. Further away, people crossed the street calmly, without hurrying, all of them caught in the same sun-bliss, a silent reverence to the gentle light. The whole of Harare in this descending hour, it seemed, was turned red, orange, blood-black.
The universe is huge. Even in the pervasive daily trials of Zimbabwe, everyone knows that there are greater rhythms in life. There is a bigger force that cradles and destroys us, that will destroy this puny dictatorship.
The last faltering light – now struggling to be seen on the horizon, beyond the trees surrounding State House – shimmered for a few seconds and finally died. The dark blue expanse of the sky yielded to the moon. Barely visible, the full, small circle could be traced from the yellowed crescent. Slowly the sky pulsed and glittered with stars.
Viktor felt a kinship with Lancelot sitting next to him, opening and closing the gate. He felt this exultant affinity extend ceaselessly, stretching, embracing Nelson, Anne-Marie, his comrades, all of these strangers – all the same, all like him, all glorious, all insignificant.
Lancelot leant forward in his chair. The newspaper on his lap fell to the ground. He pressed a single finger against one nostril, breathed in loudly and snorted through his nose. A stream of yellow mucus sprayed his trousers and the ground. Lancelot brought his sleeve to his n
ose, wiped his face clean, then coughed loudly, bringing up a mouthful of phlegm. He spat. When he was done, he looked at Viktor and laughed open-mouthed.
Viktor roused himself, shook his head clear and sat up straight. All this romance, the sun, the stars, the pointless moon. What does the universe matter when the real arbiter of life is that man ensconced in his palace, admiring the night sky like me? It’s the global elite, it’s capitalism that orders life and death in London and Harare. Human society is everything, he thought – suddenly excited, proud of himself. Until we are done with those arbiters we’ll have no time to commune with the universe.
At these thoughts, Viktor laughed aloud.
*
He wrote the drafts of his articles in longhand, in a supply of lined school exercise books decorated with shiny colour photos of Zimbabwe’s historical monuments. One had a photo of Heroes Acre, the burial ground for veterans of ZANU-PF and the struggle against Rhodesia. On the cover was President Mugabe wrapped up in party colours, wearing a baseball cap and punching the air with an arm that he could no longer straighten and a clenched, lopsided fist. On another notebook there was a photo of Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of Zimbabwe’s glorious past, a city of stone: the conical, cement-less towers, houses and forts rising out of the ground. In his seat at Louis’s café, Viktor traced the photo with his fingers.
He had visited Great Zimbabwe; he had been ordered to by Nelson. ‘Just to knock out some of that residual Eurocentrism from your head. Even you, Vik, an enlightened European’ – at this Viktor had rolled his eyes – ‘will need to shake down that racism and purge it from yourself. I may sound very X-Party, but there is no substitute for experience.’
Nelson had stood over Viktor after a midweek meeting, holding a half-drunk bottle of wine, when his eyes had widened suddenly. ‘Do you know Engels said an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory? You need to travel to Masvingo. Take the bus and visit Great Zimbabwe. You can stay with my parents.’ Emptying the bottle, he had leant on Viktor’s shoulder. His vocal cords were never enough: Nelson needed to physically connect. Nelson was smaller, the frames of his glasses taped together, his long, neglected locks hung over his back and chest, weighing down his head. He spoke as if his words were emanating through his pressed fingertips. Nelson had pulled out his phone from his pocket and focused with difficulty on the small screen. ‘Let’s get this done now,’ he’d said. He spoke, the phone against his ear, and without a word from Viktor his travel and accommodation were arranged. Viktor had left the next day.