by Zeilig, Leo;
She had dragged her blanket from her bed over her shoulders and sat on the floor in the corner of the room, the light from the window striping her legs. ‘This life you lead, comrade, will leave you permanently alone,’ she teased him. ‘You’ll die and there will be no one at your funeral, you’ll be alone in some miserable London cemetery. And I won’t come. I wouldn’t travel to London for a birth or a burial. You’ll be alone on that intolerable island. Alone, do you hear me, with no one to miss you. Be warned. An unmarked grave waits for you. You’ll leave the world unmissed. I know what this means, I know that part of the world.’
Tendai took the gibe, chewed it over, considered its seriousness: ‘You see where you are mistaken, sister? I have lived most of my life alone. You think I wore shorts and lived in a communal cell in Cape Town? I had my own brick room, too short for me to stretch out in, with blankets for a bed and a bucket for shitting. Alone, you say? I have been alone. I was in a cell alone for seven years. Shitting alone for seven years.’
Suddenly he leapt up, then squatted in front of the sofa, his elbows out, squeezing, his limbs flailing, and then he laughed loudly and collapsed back on the sofa. He opened his arms and encompassed more of the space. ‘I don’t live for my funeral,’ he said, more calmly. ‘If so, I would not move or travel or live. I wouldn’t have arguments or speak out. Fuck my mourners. Fuck the living when I am dead. Let them get on with changing the world. Keep the worshipping of the dead to the politicians. I am a dog of the wind, and we all die alone.’ Then, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, emotion strangely heavy on his voice, ‘Don’t waste your time on these questions, sister. If you come anywhere near my grave when I am gone, I will fucking rise up from the dead.’
‘If you do anything stupid in the UK they will deport you. Do you know what’s happening in Europe? It’s the chute. The collapse. The catastrophe. The place is full of racists and little fascists. If you leave London, if you escape any of the major cities on that island, you are taking your life in your own hands.’ She pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. ‘No, Tendai, don’t interrupt me. Listen. I am not joking.’ Frustrated, trying to find the words, she lapsed into French. ‘Ils chassent les immigrés comme les bêtes. I know what I am talking about. It’s not the Promised Land of jobs and plenty. I have read the reports. I have friends, Society members, who have been arrested and deported. They will hunt you if you put a foot wrong, and you will never know where to put your bloody feet.’ Then, laughing, checking herself, eliminating the tone of reprimand, ‘And your feet are so big, you only know where not to put them. I give you a month, umngani.’
*
Two days later they sat unusually silent in Anne-Marie’s beat-up Golf at the airport, Tendai’s arm draped casually over her shoulder, Anne-Marie gripping the steering wheel hard, breathing deeply – refusing everything that rose in her chest, the bile of emotion in her throat, fighting back each enticement to cry.
‘I’m not coming into the airport. You can do that alone,’ she said with a gulp of air.
Tendai spoke. ‘I said we’ll speak when I arrive and then whenever we need to. Nightly, if necessary. Do you hear me? Our sagas need to be fed, I need to hear your voice, sister – we need to talk.’ Tendai pushed the passenger seat back, his khaki cloth backpack between his legs. ‘And speak to Nelson, okay? Tell him what you want and what you don’t want. And keep the voices away, hanzadzi – far away.’ Frustrated that there was no response, he dug further in. ‘Remember, romantic relationships are a colonial lie, a Western imposition. Even in the West they are only, what, two hundred and fifty years old? In Africa, barely a few decades – in most places here they don’t really exist. You can be single, you can be childless if you want – you can escape these voices, this, this’ – Tendai brought his hands up, rubbed them together, tried to find the words, to create the phrase from the static of his palms – ‘this historical anomaly, and you can be happy.’
Anne-Marie remained still, stiff, her position hostile. She stared ahead towards the terminal. A couple battled with a battered trolley loaded with suitcases, boxes secured with string and tape.
Breathing in deeply, swallowing loudly, Anne-Marie finally relaxed, fell back into the seat and dropped a hand onto Tendai’s knee. ‘Okay, I hear you. Our sagas. The phone. The resistance. Now get out of the car before the Brits discover who they have travelling to their island fortress and you’re deported before you even leave. Get out.’ She turned and, for the first time since they’d left, she looked into his face. His eyes were wet and bloodshot. ‘Now go. And I will see you in a month. I give you a month. Only a month. Do you hear me?’
On the journey home Anne-Marie cried loudly, the tears clouding the road, blurring the route, and she shouted, holding the steering wheel too tightly. ‘You idiot, you idiot,’ she repeated over and over again, ‘stupide, bête, idiot, imbécile, débile.’ Who was this rage for – herself, Tendai, Nelson? She didn’t know why she’d let him leave, how they’d survive without each other or why they needed to.
She realised minutes later that this cleansing fit of sentiment expressed something utterly new to her: the first and only genuine friendship she’d had. Her friendship with Tendai was freer than she thought possible, clear of obligation, doubt, ambiguity, hesitation. Anne-Marie’s greatest weakness was her denial of her weaknesses, her refusal to accept legitimate pain, her efforts to push on. But she was clear about Tendai. She realised quickly that her tears were a celebration of their friendship and their freedom to lean on each other or not, to be in touch or not. And to be themselves, completely (and when are we ever really ourselves, she thought).
Almost immediately her life of meetings, funding applications, field trips, conferences – the sub-Saharan jamboree of NGO work – intruded, elbowing any further lashes of emotion aside.
Peculiarly, Tendai and Anne-Marie did not communicate on the telephone. Instead they found their rhythm in email. Tendai’s missives were political and positive; Anne-Marie’s were infrequent, typed on her phone in bed when she remembered, sitting up, propped against the wall by uncovered pillows. She knew Tendai didn’t need the affirmation of her replies, the buying-into-the-friendship, so weeks, even months on one occasion, passed without a response from her. Never did Tendai write (and it did not occur to him to do so) that he wanted to hear from her or that he needed to know she’d received his messages.
It seemed that prison had freed Tendai of cravings, needs, insecurity and fear. Instead it gave him – in certain matters of human relations – an infinity of patience, a capacity to wait, to just be. For his friendship with Anne-Marie there were categories of communication. His full-bodied, entirely present communication was reserved for political involvement. He scoffed at émigré politics, the lazy kinship of being African in the UK; his involvement, his yearning for argument, for understanding, had to include his physical presence, his entire soul.
‘In this cursed land, on this dark, primitive, northern island,’ he explained, a year into his cleaning job at the university, to other cleaners and security guards gathered for their mid-morning tea in the underground staffroom, ‘we have a duty of exposition. We need to reveal ourselves to the sea of ignorance around us.’ He indicated the floors above, the seething, weighty complacency of the white-collar masses in their offices and boardrooms. ‘This is project number one. Nkrumah called it philosophical consciencism.’ The more effort his colleagues made not to listen, the louder Tendai became, raising his voice, demanding attention. Staring directly at Kwesi, who was splashing soap and water on his mug in the sink, he continued, ‘Nkrumah saw emancipation, unification and the development of Africa and its scattered people, of which there are a few representatives here. I propose widening the project to the entire Global South and North.’
All this, the preaching, the conversations – head-cracking, he called it – he wrote to Anne-Marie.
It is the tragedy of our epoch that sometimes we must break bones, crack open the sk
ull, in a series of violent and direct blows. I am busy filling these heads with new sagas. I AM A REVOLUTIONARY SURGEON. I will wear the circles of bone around my neck for each head I have conquered, for each step taken to change the world towards our liberation. I will conquer this city. I WILL lead the inhabitants of this prison out of their madness and fever. Do you hear me?
Anne-Marie heard him and laughed. She lay, satisfied, on the sofa, her shoes kicked off, chuckling, holding the email she’d printed at the office, knowing she’d have no signal at home. The pleasure was intense. Early the next day, before anyone arrived at the office, she wrote back, her coffee next to the keyboard and the grubby, creased pages of Tendai’s printed email next to her.
Tendai,
You have sinned and I am writing quickly, before work, to tell you where you have gone wrong. I insist on immediate correction. You speak about filling the heads you have broken with new sagas, but you will understand that these are only our sagas. Our stories. These other ‘sagas’ you mention are not sagas as much as political ideas – theories or arguments. In other words, they are other devices entirely. I forgive you, of course, how could I not, though I insist on a printed apology – in the Herald – and a promise never again to use our language for this thing you do to people’s heads in London. Reading your words, Tendai, I think it is you who needs to be relieved of the pressures of madness (and the procedure, while we are discussing it, is called trepanation – I will perform it on you when you return).
You know I have been thinking about you. For all your bluster, your head-cracking expressiveness, you are the least bitter person I have ever known. I used to ask myself why you are not angrier for the years you spent in prison, with no one who had any clout, any pull or power to help you. You have described it to me: the beatings, the torture. How can any human being spend 9,078 days in prison – you see, I remember the number – and not be mentally broken? That is the mystery, Tendai. You emerged with a beautiful knowledge of yourself and an education, even if this is not the way you tell the story. I remember you saying that after 1994, when you knew you wouldn’t be released, you spent a year trying to get yourself killed and the injuries you still carry: eight unhealed broken bones, two collapsed discs, blinded in one eye ... do I need to go on? Do I? But you are less a victim to what happened to you than I am to what did not happen to me. I don’t know why I am saying all of this – I suppose I want to say that your emails, these electronic sagas, have helped me to see you.
I haven’t made the definitive statement to Nelson, or to my family, but they know I am not going home, wherever that is – to the Congo or France. I am staying here. I belong more to Zimbabwe than anywhere else. The saga of children continues. There is a small child who stays with his uncle – you met him, he lives on the same floor as me. I play with him sometimes. Nelson gets me to read the emails you send and complains that you do not answer him. I consider this an act of solidarity, comrade.
I have a story for you, a footnote in our saga: one morning last week, Nelson declared, after a few moments’ silence, stretched on the bed, sipping a glass of wine he’d left by the bed the evening before, ‘You know, mudiwa, I think I want a child. What good is an activist without knowing children? Save us from a revolution led by childless men and women. What can we know of the world without bringing in new life? Without knowing that love? So – children, comrade, what do you say?’ Can you picture him, spread out on the bed like a spider? And what did I say, you ask? I got out of bed and stood over him and said, Tendai-like, ‘Is that a proposal, comrade? Maybe you can have one under Any Other Business at the end of the next meeting of the Society.’ Then I shouted, ‘I will move back to France if you mention this again. Having children is not a revolutionary responsibility, an agenda item, an experience. It is something women do.’ He stared at me, then nodded his head and said, ‘You may have a point.’
I do have a fucking point.
Now enough of this. What I wanted to say, my remarque improvisée, why I am writing – and before I decide not to say it or read through what I have written and delete everything – Tendai, grant me some sentimentality. There is not enough in our line of life. You have taught me that the only way to get through life is to love someone. Why do we make it so difficult, this simple message? And yes, I hear you, we have to clear the obstacles to love: the poverty, the rich, the divisions, but the message is that simple. YOUR LESSON – MR SURGEON OF HEAD-CRACKING – IS LOVE. I know you won’t like this but it’s true, you are really a healer, a n’anga. The only thing we have between us is love, and that currency is the only thing that stops us from turning bitter. Love stops us from being poisoned by the bitterness of life. What do you say to that, hanzadzi? Do you hear me?
Aside from the emails, his communications typed out slowly, precisely on the reappropriated university computer, Tendai occasionally conceded to Anne-Marie’s text messages, her tone insistent, demanding his response. Laboriously, painfully, he answered her, his fingers pressing the keys, the plastic of the phone cracking – cursing the words that wouldn’t come.
Anne-Marie: I need your address, Tendai. I want to send you something. ANSWER THIS.
Tendai: I will get it for you, com – in an email tomorrow.
Anne-Marie: How does someone not know their address? It’s where you live. Get out of bed and open your front door and read the street name and the door number.
Tendai: Addresses are complicated in London. Tomorrow. Why do you want it?
Anne-Marie: Why? Because I want to phone the police to tell them that there is a dangerous African in the city who can’t decide where he is from.
Tendai: Hold off mailing me, com. I will send the address when I have located a safe house.
Anne-Marie: A safe house! Listen to you.
Anne-Marie laughed aloud at this.
Tendai: If you can hold off for a fortnight and make sure the envelope is flat so it can be posted through the letterbox.
Anne-Marie: Flat? How am I going to send you a pair of socks and a pullover through some slit in a London door?
Tendai: Why are you sending me socks?
Anne-Marie: Because it’s cold and London is unforgiving. I am knitting them.
Tendai: You do not know how to make clothes.
Anne-Marie: Listen Mr Know-Anne-Marie, I was taught by my grandmother. I come home and knit. I have started to knit again. I listen to the radio, knit and forget.
Tendai: Why do I not know this?
Anne-Marie: You do now. I am going away for a few days and will send them when I am back.
Tendai: Where are you going?
Anne-Marie: I am going to Nairobi for a week. It’s a retreat with seven other regional NGOs – we have hired a hotel.
Tendai: Criminal.
Anne-Marie: Basically it’s going to be a big soirée pyjama.
Tendai: I see. Sharing a hotel with Africa’s Lords and Ladies of Poverty. The poor are grateful to you, com.
Anne-Marie: I miss you, Tendai – our conversations, our sagas. I have no one to talk to, not really. Nelson is a constant absent-presence. You know, I wish he was either absent or present, not both.
Tendai: He is lucky to have you, even if it will only be when you leave him before he understands that. You need to decide what you want from him and then make a decision.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Tendai: Can I lecture you? He will always be an in-out presence in your life. There is only one permanence for the comrade. You need to tell him.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
Tendai: Use your big sell-out workshop in Nairobi to make the break or to start the break. You cannot wean a hungry child with an empty breast.
Anne-Marie: What does that mean?
Tendai: I have no idea.
Anne-Marie: LOL.
Tendai: What does THAT mean?
Anne-Marie: Laugh Out Loud.
Tendai: Anne-Marie, com, are you listening to me? You are trying to do the hardest thing, to turn your back on t
he jackals, that chorus of disapproval. But you are not alone.
Anne-Marie: I feel alone.
Tendai: I am here, com.
Anne-Marie: You are in London.
Tendai: No, I am not.
Anne-Marie: Then where the fuck are you?
Tendai: I will not leave Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, militant action and sacrifice can freedom be won. The struggle is my life.
Anne-Marie: Since when do you quote Mandela?
Tendai: Occasionally the bastard sell-out could weave a decent line or two. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.
Anne-Marie: Ha, ha. They were all just bloody liberals. Freedom, liberation, independence – meaningless slogans without content. No political economy. No analysis. My grandfather was the same.
Tendai: Steady on, com. Lumumba was a bit better.
Anne-Marie: Maybe.
Tendai: Now you’re sounding like Nelson and me.
Anne-Marie: No, Tendai, I am sounding like me.
Tendai: Yes, you are.
Anne-Marie: Sorry, Tendai. You have got me in my heure du crime. I can get dreadfully negative.
Tendai: Analytical I would call it. You don’t have to put up a front for me, com.
Anne-Marie: I am happy to have you – god that is an understatement.
Tendai: I am glad I can be here. You know I’m here – insomniac lunatic who sleeps two hours a night. I really am always around, twenty-two hours a day. Com, you know that, don’t you?
Anne-Marie: We just need to be here for each other. As distant as we are – you too must just message me if I am out of contact. I am never far away from you.
Tendai: Good. That’s what we need and I feel your presence. Mr Surgeon of Head-Cracking has now mastered text messaging.
