An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  The morning blew a cooling breeze.

  ‘Now the city chooses to breathe, after suffocating us in the night,’ Viktor muttered in the morning.

  ‘Always a complaint, Viktor. The problem is in your head, not in the night.’ Anne-Marie rushed to pull on her clothes. she sorted through the pile of cast-offs on the floor with her feet, kicking aside the pieces she didn’t want, hooking the others up with her toes, swinging a blouse over her shoulders, tugging her trousers over her hips.

  Viktor needed coffee to burrow to the light. As he walked into town he repeated his to-do list for the day, drunk on exhaustion, zigzagging around potholes, pedestrians, swaying, tottering on street corners, staring at the oncoming cars, straining to focus, searching for comprehension. The campaign was over, but he couldn’t stop. He wanted to email the supporters, those who had helped Biko. He practised the wording, tried to get the tone right. He needed to send information – a complete dossier – to Amnesty about the arrests, the imprisonment, the death, as the representative had told him the previous day: ‘As many details as possible, everything – the school he went to, his family, his interests. The circumstances of his death.’ Then he needed to phone the prison and demand to speak to the prison governor. To make his final threats, to tell him it didn’t end here. He was exhausted just contemplating it.

  Viktor’s shoe hit an upturned paving stone. He swore and stumbled forward, his balance lost. He hobbled out of kilter and his torso folded, feet out, arms akimbo. He staggered along for a few steps like a great albatross with its huge wings out, paddling frantically at the air to pick up speed and fly.

  There was a counter at Louis’s café where customers could stand, rest their coffee, read their papers and then go. Today Viktor decided he would stand, let his entire system hang upright, correctly – to give his tasks urgency and importance.

  He felt the drag of the day on his heart, the dread of everything he needed to do. He paused, scrolled down the list of folders, saw the file ‘Nina’ recording, like all of them, lost time, preserving examples: low, profound, significant and irrelevant events. Viktor looked up at two well-dressed women sitting near him. One was bent over the table, pleading to her friend, it seemed. The other seemed distracted, distant, scanning the café for something.

  Viktor opened the folder and scrolled down the emails. He felt his stomach lurch as he remembered the messages – his, hers, their fights, the record of each here, the causes, the courting, the longing. The love in the first messages, the decay in the later ones. In fact, the whole litany of their life together was here, from its festive, impatient beginnings to the slow agony of separation at the end.

  ‘Too much, too much,’ Viktor muttered, his head starting to spin, his brow moistening. He searched around the café for relief, stared out of the window to the street, the activity outside, the lack of any commemoration of life in the daily crusade of the city. Have they not heard that Biko is dead?

  Viktor dropped his head back to the screen. He decided he would find the emails where Nina had slandered him, where, once more, she had used Rosa to hurt him. He searched.

  Viktor opened email after email, searching for Nina’s crimes. Soon he had dozens of windows open, different browsers’ windows, old Word files – each stored as evidence of their life together. Sweat dripping from him, Viktor opened a new email, a message sent years ago, with Nina’s delight, her love, on each line. He closed it and opened another, this time a message sent to him a year ago, after he had taken Rosa for the weekend:

  Viktor, you seem to have lost Rosa’s new cardigan. My mother spent weeks making it for her. I am upset. Are you still planning to take Rosa next weekend? Please let me know. Nina.

  Digging deeper, another message – just after he had left her.

  Viktor, come home. We miss you. Your place is here. Nina.

  Pushing this one aside, he found other notes, files he had kept – he imagined – to show Rosa one day what her mother had done to him. Viktor swallowed, wiped his sleeve over his mouth, pinched his eyes – maybe he was not seeing right. He found the store of her emails, those messages, everything that had been said to him. The hate she had heaped on him, the reason he left – but what did it matter now? he asked himself.

  He paused and gripped the table with both hands, letting it ground him. Something solid, real, outside of himself, not this traitorous, unreliable past. Suddenly the foundation for all of his indignation – the bile he had built up, the persecution he had kneaded and baked with his anger and brought to life, collapsed.

  Clear, honest, facing the facts, Viktor wetted his throat and realised, with a terrible sadness which tightened his chest, that although he now had these emails open in front of him, they didn’t really matter. The ones he read were sad, desperate, lost, her anger translucent and pathetic. They were evidence of Nina’s pain, her loneliness – nothing else. When her anger surfaced, he saw it now only as a bid to be heard, to show him her pain.

  Viktor leant harder on the counter and it creaked. We let time go, release it, because the truth of the past is unbearable – the reality of our folly is too crushing.

  A collage of his life with Nina flashed suddenly before him – the whole storyboard of their relationship, its beginning and end. The order was muddled. Rosa’s small body, between them on the bench after the trip to the fair. Nina crying to him on the phone. Viktor tried to mop his face with his hand. What else have I told myself? What other stories have I lived by?

  Then he thought of Biko. He felt the old sickness, loss, the defeat.

  Biko’s life had presented him with something. He looked up and saw the road, the rage of taxis and cars, the horns, people trying to cross, shouting at each other. Then in the distance he saw two men, one affectionately tapping his friend with a rolled-up paper as he spoke, then placing a hand on his shoulder, laughing. What are they saying to each other? What’s making them so happy? So alive? The clouds parted and the street suddenly disappeared, washed with sunlight. Viktor squinted. Everything had vanished – slowly he could make out the road again, the men still talking. He felt the heat of the sun through the glass and let the force of the sensation surge through him.

  Viktor felt a flow of inexplicable happiness, but no obvious explanation came to him – just the sun, the heat, the day. Was there something in this – a clarity in the darkness? A secret that had finally been revealed to him, turning the darkness in Zimbabwe, in him, in all conditions, into clear light and joy? Turning everything over to the light, as Biko had proclaimed. Viktor laughed aloud and muttered to himself, ‘All this time I have been searching in myself for a reason and I have found nothing.’

  Viktor remembered Samuel’s words: that Biko had always seen beauty, that there was something insane, euphoric about his visions. Beauty from the darkness. Beauty all around us.

  Viktor shut his computer, sucked in deeply, filled his lungs, dropped his things into his bag and left the café.

  *

  For some reason the decision was easy after Biko had been buried and his dead feet, calves, thighs took the strain for eternity, or until he could be buried properly after X-Party had been overthrown. There was always a chill in the morning, even in the summer before the sun came up. Anne-Marie had taken the morning off to walk with Viktor by the dam, then drive him to the airport. When they stepped out of the car, under the pines, Viktor felt as though the wheels constantly spinning in his head had finally stopped. For once Africa’s clock was kind to them and let them ponder Harare’s wonderful, waking, dewy morning. While they walked under the trees the world could rest from paradox and contradiction – the exhausting, tireless dialectic of existence.

  The couple stood outside the car in the empty car park, staring at the tree line, the path they would take in a minute. When they started to walk there was the sound of the gravel under their feet and the hard rustle of the wind in the trees.

  ‘I have signed up to do a course in physics at UNISIA in Pretoria,’ Anne-Marie s
aid as they walked into the thick cluster of trees in Cleveland Park. The temperature dropped. The early sun cast a disordered, speckled pattern on the path.

  ‘Physics? Why physics?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘Because I have been interested in physics since I was a child. I received the school prize when I was thirteen.’

  They walked towards the large green expanse in front of the dam. The morning felt deceptively normal.

  ‘I didn’t know. You’ve never mentioned it before.’

  ‘There is much you don’t know about me.’ Anne-Marie’s reply came out more harshly than she’d intended; the sting of it left both of them silent. More than I can ever know, now that I am leaving. Viktor’s heart heaved.

  ‘As a child I thought I could explain everything with physics – what was really going on. It shrank our lives and activities into a space as infinitesimal as that spider.’ Anne-Marie pointed to two small saplings recently planted – they are still planting trees, Viktor thought – with solid sticks holding them straight, evidence of the expansion of the wood, of optimism. Between the infant trees was a large web with drops of dew hanging on it, and in one corner was a spider the size of a hand – too large for the web, too significant, with its yellow-and-black legs and body, for Anne-Marie’s example.

  ‘Of course I only scratched the surface, but still I had a sense of studying the building blocks of everything. It broke us down into a mass of particles that made the stars and planets. I even thought that we should adapt the Christianity I was learning: from particle to particle – you know the text.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Viktor quickly, wanting Anne-Marie to know he was still hurt.

  ‘I thought physics could be used to rewrite Genesis. “Particle thou art and unto particle thou shalt return.” I wanted to study physics because physics explains everything, and what of our peculiar behaviour and hurt it could not explain was not important.’

  ‘But it is from our peculiar behaviour that we live.’

  ‘There is enough in life, mudiwa, that is already difficult to understand without adding our own.’ She reached for his hand and held it tightly. They were barely walking, reluctant to reach the far end of the dam, where they would be forced to turn back to the car.

  ‘Amy loved physics.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t talk about her much.’

  ‘Well, I am now.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘We are twins.’

  ‘What, jumeaux? Identical?’

  ‘No, she’s a she. I have a penis.’

  ‘Viktor!’ Anne-Marie exclaimed, laughing.

  ‘Identical in a way. We are the same mass of particles, almost the same height.’

  ‘Why have you never spoken of this?’

  Viktor ignored the question. ‘She is like you, more rational than me. When we were teenagers and our parents went away, she would sleep in their bed and invite her friends over. Afterwards she’d shake the bedding, brush down the sheets and move back to her room. I never understood that.’

  ‘What didn’t you understand?’

  ‘That she would sleep in our parents’ sheets, in their smells, where they made love.’

  ‘Now I am the one who doesn’t understand.’ Anne-Marie stated.

  ‘It was her lack of imagination. How could she sleep? I didn’t understand how she could do this.’

  The sun was completely out now. Viktor felt its heat. The day doesn’t wake gradually in Zimbabwe; it rushes into the sky as if it is playing, searching for the night, driving away the moon and stars so there is only day, only light.

  The couple walked beside the large spread of still water, the concrete wall and the grass, the playing fields where once the city had taken its Sunday picnics. Now families and children camped and sheltered here. People were folding up cardboard shelters and shaking out their blankets; others stood in the sun, stretched, yawned, urinated.

  ‘Not everyone is as prone to that sort of thinking as you, Viktor. Life might be easier for Amy without your imagination, if that’s what you call it.’

  Anne-Marie looked at Viktor, pleading, he thought, with her eyes, willing him to free himself from some of that intensity, beseeching him to understand the meaning of their particle mass, to let life fall into its correct place.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter so much, these patterns of thought,’ she resumed. ‘Your, your – tête dans les nuages. You could go on a hundred years, but you take each thing so seriously. Each wrong step for you, mudiwa, rebounds.’

  ‘I’m not so bad,’ Viktor said. ‘It’s you today who has the strange theories about physics and particles.’

  Anne-Marie laughed again, her great, free, unbound laugh. ‘I am not joking. I enrolled on a correspondence course. When I see you again I will be Professor of Particle Physics. I will unpick you one atom at a time until I get to your sex.’

  The path along the dam wall tapered out. They could either climb and walk back, circling the park on the road, or turn back. They stopped. Anne-Marie, as she often did at this point, climbed the bank, three steps, until she stood above Viktor. She put her arms on his shoulders and pulled him to her, so his head rested on her chest, between her breasts. He placed his hand on her lower back, felt the rise of her buttocks, the soft, firm cushion of her breasts, the deep familiar smell that gathered in her neck.

  They had not made love on their last night; there would have been too much longing. But now, standing close to her, he was aroused and the missing was acute. His body surged with excitement, with craving and loss. Was this love? Had he only made another connection that, like all the others, would lead to loss? Was this worth more than his daughter?

  As they walked back, their pace brisker, more matter-of-fact, a woman with a neatly folded blanket under her arm and a small child approached them. ‘Sir, madam. Money for food? A dollar.’ Viktor pulled out his wallet and handed the woman a ten-dollar bill. The woman stared at the note and called out as they walked away, ‘Thank you, sir, madam! Thank you, mambo!’

  ‘Fucking Zimbabwe,’ Viktor muttered.

  ‘Well, now it’s your fucking Zimbabwe as well,’ Anne-Marie said.

  ‘I was going to give you ten dollars for petrol, for the run to the airport.’ Viktor draped his hand around Anne-Marie’s shoulder and tensed, pulling her towards him.

  ‘Let her eat for a week,’ Anne-Marie replied.

  Even though he’d mentioned it to her before, each day in fact since he had booked the ticket, he said it again now. ‘Rosa’s concert is in a couple of days. I will go along, if Nina allows it. I have a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘Give yourself enough time with Rosa and your parents. Don’t rush.’ Anne-Marie repeated her line.

  ‘And then I’ll be back. To visit Kinshasa with you.’

  He was leaving Zimbabwe just when Lenin and Stalin and the others no longer judged him as a white man, a murungu, when he was almost a person who could be trusted. Without Anne-Marie, he thought, he’d make more mistakes; he’d fall again without her, without them. What would stop him? Drawing a line, making a mental pause, he caught himself: I can’t promise not to make more mistakes, but as long as I know my own mind, that’s all that matters – as long as I know my own practice.

  Viktor repeated himself; he felt clear at last, decided. ‘I need to see Rosa, then I am coming back.’

  Along the same path through the trees, the walk looked different. By a tree on the fringe of the famous park there was a cluster of white flowers, a miniature field. From the small, open, cone-shaped petals hung a long green stigma.

  ‘What are those?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘You have asked me before. I still don’t know. I will find out the names of all the trees and flowers for your return. The whole ecosystem.’

  Viktor rested one knee on the ground and his weight raised moisture in the earth, wetting his trousers. He stared at the flowers and placed one on his finger. He looked into the p
lant’s heart, the thin filaments, the thicker ovary. Then, holding the flower, he pinched it gently between his fingers: an entire plant species with its own desire for fertilisation and existence, the will to extend beyond the limits of life, to spread and prolong the community of flowers where it now grew. A form of life not entirely unlike his, though perhaps with fewer false starts, less questioning.

  Automatically Viktor’s hand reached to his pocket for the notebook where he kept his ideas. He checked himself and noticed an odd feeling: he didn’t want to write. Not another sentence, not a single word about these flowers, or anything. Instead he found the flower’s stem. Tracing it to the grass, he pulled it free without another thought. He stood and presented it to Anne-Marie. ‘This is for us,’ he said.

  Chapter Forty

  For the flights that now arrived and departed daily from Harare International, a new terminal had been built in the heyday of the boom. This had been in the nineties, when there was a veneer of calm over Zimbabwe, when the old man was feted by the Queen and the country lauded by the West. Shopping centres had sprung up in the city, sprawling malls in the suburbs decorated by the giant cockerel of Great Zimbabwe. And a new airport had been built.

  The terminal was empty, the sliding doors broken and held ajar with loose bricks. Anne-Marie and Viktor entered the building without speaking and surveyed the sea of granite, the closed boutiques and wilting miniature palms that divided the long concourse, the flight counters at one end and airline offices at the other. Two children ran around the potted trees and their shouts echoed through the airport. Viktor dropped his bag next to a bench, sat down and offered his hand to Anne-Marie. They sat in silence, apart, hand in hand.

  A moment later there was a screech of tyres and a clatter of voices and slamming doors. Nelson, Lenin, and Stalin burst into the lobby, each of them wearing the same T-shirt, a solitary red star circled with the words Shinga Mushandi Shinga!