An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  Anne-Marie: I am sending you sagas and peace as you drift into your two-hour sleep, com.

  Tendai: I am sending you the will to turn theory into practice. In Nairobi.

  Anne-Marie: I just want love, Tendai.

  Tendai: I am sending that as well.

  Chapter Five

  Viktor filled his bag with books, notes, his computer, wiped the table of the spilled coffee. He stood and walked to the counter, the cup and saucer rattling, his shoulder bent with the weight of the bag. Tendai was right. He needed to participate, demonstrate. But the article had to be completed, posted, syndicated, and he needed to update Facebook.

  Viktor took the back stairs that led to his second-floor office – a marble, off-white stairwell, the windows and cased radiators covered in oak, the period toilet a whole restoration, from front lobby to back staircase. The toilets on the first floor held his preferred cubicle, with the perfect heavy three-quarter-length oak door, the low window the height of the ledge, deep enough to hold a bag. Everything was perfect in this building.

  Viktor was too careful. He could only proceed in life with a set of meticulous calculations and routines. The morning latte, the table nearest the counter in the university canteen, the final espresso that would function at the allotted moment to loosen his bowels, then the walk to the stairs, the climb. On the first floor he would rest, his nose would itch, and he’d sneeze three times. All things must have their place. The cubicle would be his, the bag swung into place on the window ledge before he’d dropped onto the toilet seat, the cold hard plastic pleasing on his buttocks.

  Viktor removed his jacket from the door. Under it he saw the sign:

  BCW Prides Itself On Absolute Cleanliness.

  If There Is Anything That Dissatisfies You Please Contact Our Service Desk.

  Viktor felt his stomach turn, his forehead moisten. He thought of Tendai, the women he knew, the Zimbabweans who cleaned the toilets. Bastards, They Want Our Complicity In Their Exploitation – they want us to shit and complain. Absolute Cleanliness, what does that mean anyway? Such a lazy use of the absolute. No one since Hegel believes in the absolute. Cleanliness is relative, partial, incomplete, an approximation.

  Viktor stood in front of the mirror, water crashing over his hands, wetting his cuffs. He looked into the mirror, saw the reflection of the clock, translated the reversed hands: nine forty-five. Two hours to complete the article. The shared office would be empty for a fortnight while the other PhD students, temporary lecturers and interns were away. Each hour accounted for.

  Tendai said the cleaners were asking for the London living wage. ‘Only the London living minimum, man. Eight pounds ten pence per hour. Puny, pathetic, and that’s all we dare ask for.’ Viktor thought about the demonstration, the crowd of students with their drums, the echo they would make in the courtyard, their voices ricocheting on the concrete. Then there would be the ritual pushing against the security guards, our own swollen-faced brothers in their fluorescent yellow vests, arms linked to prevent the protesters from entering the building. Passers-by averting their gaze – and Tendai, his cart parked, waving a pile of leaflets, shouting at them from the back of the crowd, ‘When we win the living wage, brothers, you too will benefit. Shinga Mushandi, Shinga!’

  *

  Viktor,

  I wanted to email you rapidly a series of slogans from the mass camps I was telling you about in Madrid’s Plaza Puerta del Sol. I thought you could use them on your website, or read them to your daughter (a young mind is NEVER too young to understand the sheer necessity and urgency of revolution).

  Tell her, tell Rosa, that hundreds of thousands of young working-class unemployed men and women AND children have been living together in a public square (this is the new form of organising we have to understand) and they have chalked these slogans onto the pavements and walls. Democracia! No nos callaran! – They won’t shut us up! And my favourite, my absolute gut-rejoicing choice of revolutionary slogan is: ‘We can’t even afford chorizo to put on the bread!’ When the Spanish write this you realise that the revolution is coming – that the full Phase 3 isn’t far behind.

  Then, comrade, there is a board on one side of the square, the sort that we have at the university to advertise corporate funding, but with old black and white photos of anti-fascist workers from 1936.

  And the best is for last. This European movement, this occupation of one of the continent’s great squares by workers, students, school kids and pensioners has been copied by protesters in Burkina Faso. In the centre of Ouagadougou, nicknamed Liberation Square, there is a permanent occupation of thousands which has also SCRATCHED slogans in chalk on the pavement from Madrid ... with one brilliant, magnificent addition. In capitals the workers have written (in French):

  ‘WE ARE THE WHEELS THAT TURN THE WHOLE WORLD’ – these are my capitals.

  And in this political statement, they are streets ahead of their European brothers and sisters, who still have illusions – opposing good and bad bankers and politicians, for example.

  Tell your daughter all of this if you can and also try to put it on your website.

  Yours in struggle,

  Tendai

  *

  The row was hardly dry before a fresh coat was applied. They kept tripping over the unsettled earth, making new arguments where a week ago they had walked easily on the trampled, firm ground. Viktor washed up, splashing water on the dishes; Nina moved noisily around the flat, tidying Rosa’s toys, dropping them into the box in the lounge. The coloured xylophone rang unpleasantly as it hit the other toys. Nina continued their row with the flat, knocking angrily against the sofa, shaking the dust out of the rug.

  Viktor had optimistically prepared the meal they’d eaten in separate rooms, conducting their fight between mouthfuls, not even tasting the food. What was it about? I can’t remember. All there is, now we’ve stopped shouting, is the headache, the echo. Our words sliding off the walls, clattering to the floor, the sound of the doors just slammed, hanging in the air. He shook the water off a pot lid.

  Sonia had given them the pot, boxed up in a collection of cups, plates and pans for their new life. But why this one? Viktor thought this was the family saucepan, with its faded black swivel handle that could be turned to an embossed arrow if the food being boiled or simmered needed ventilation. He recalled Isaac’s hopeless mess in the kitchen: a pot rattling on the hob, flour coating the table, the apron that made him look like a drag queen. Viktor held up the lid, spun the handle; it still turned, thirty-five years later.

  ‘Are you going to finish in there and help me move the bloody furniture?’ Viktor raised the lid, dripping with water, and kissed it.

  They survived so long, got through the rows that came fortnightly, as if prearranged, by watching television. Straining to avoid conflict and conversation, they watched hours of television together every evening with Rosa asleep. Sometimes, hand in hand, they sat mute, their faces relaxed. Nina tucked her feet under Viktor, interrupting their evening for toilet breaks or between courses eaten on the sofa. The TV added years to their relationship, brought them together as the conscious dead – mouths hanging open, eyes dry, unblinking at the flat screen. Life, it seemed, existed only when they were apart; still they longed for their silent TV communion, their anaesthetised union.

  Nina spat out the words across the lounge as if her mouth was expelling poison: ‘You bring nothing. Nothing. I never know when you’re going to get paid. I have had enough of supporting you, all of us, paying for everything. You should get a bloody bar job. You’re fucking useless.’

  Nina had the gift of sleep; whatever the turmoil in her life, the dissatisfaction of her days, she slept. Viktor clawed desperately at night, fought his way in, fell asleep exhausted only to wake a few hours later and then gradually, inevitably, feel his world collapse. The boyhood fear – that the veil of life would fall from him when everyone else slept and reveal the true, vibrant horror of everything in the darkness – had been replaced
with the pedestrian insomnia of life and failure. His nightly sleeplessness spoke of his hate and self-loathing – his writing a failure, his incomplete PhD a travesty, a symbol of his incomplete, flawed character, Nina’s anger with him a symptom of his absurdities, even his online world a retreat from the real one. Even his parents’ old age and imminent, certain death (never mind that they were both in good health) felt like a confirmation, somehow, of their disappointment with him. For all his midnight ravings, his pitch-black self-hate, there was an aspect to this demotic, relentless self-criticism that was true. The pain of attack at three in the morning was no less severe for being entirely solipsistic.

  Nina’s life was no less vivid or choked with questioning, but she was the family’s labourer, so she slept in the evening from exhaustion and responsibility. Her hunger for books and escape, her capacity for knowledge and learning, were more rapacious than Viktor’s. Their love had been kindled by books and ideas. Viktor had taken her writing, her fluent, scribbled prose, seriously and they had shared and talked as though they knew that they didn’t have long together. Nina wrote stories and poems – then quickly, hungrily, paralysed by doubt, she buried the notebooks and her frustrations in a suitcase under the bed.

  She had been a precocious teenager, smart and wise at thirteen – sharper, more knowing of the world, it seemed to her now, than she was at forty. Nina grew out of school, bristled, fidgeted and needed to escape from the childishness of adolescence, from the mediocre school. By thirteen her family had become a charade of incompetence: her parents separated and her father half-heartedly moved in with his lover; her mother took up with a younger man. Her half-sister was born when she was seventeen. With the divorce the family’s aspirational life – the riding lessons, the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Oxford – exhaled its last breath; everything bought on Thatcherism’s hollow promises and easy credit was sold and the scattered family became trapped by loans that had become debts, affluence that had become servitude. Nina had worked to pay off her father’s debts. Eventually her mother moved to Bristol.

  She had left school at eighteen and was working full time at nineteen. Nina worked as a clerk in a solicitor’s firm, rising to legal secretary at thirty and finally finding a position in the office of a university department, where she outsmarted, outread, and out-thought the professors with their puny interests, narrow research agendas and funding bids. Even Rosa, the daughter she loved, was a disappointment, a non-fulfilment, and she continued to ache and crave in silence – she dreamed of her writing, of books and occasionally of burning down the fucking offices and corridors where she worked. Yet Viktor – this man who she once thought might save her, who understood her, who listened – had become another burden, another disappointment.

  ‘I think that’s an exaggeration, Nina. The last months have been difficult, but I am nearly done with the PhD and I have more teaching next term.’

  ‘Rubbish. What about your daughter? She can’t wait. Who will pay for her new clothes?’

  ‘Our daughter,’ Viktor muttered.

  ‘You’re so, so ... passive-aggressive.’

  ‘If I raised my voice and slammed doors like you, you’d accuse me of being violent.’

  ‘You are!’

  Viktor combed his hair with his fingers. Next week, he thought, Nina is travelling to see her mother in Bristol. The tread on the back right tyre has gone. It will rain and she’ll drive impulsively, as she always does. The small engine will whine when her foot presses down on the pedal. Then she will brake on that large, sparsely lit motorway for the turning.

  ‘Maybe we should just do our own thing. Perhaps we spend too much time with each other. What do you think of that?’ Nina sat on the edge of the sofa, her eyes burning.

  Viktor was silent. She’ll skid, the car won’t stop, it will swerve, veer side to side. Nina will turn the steering wheel hard – exactly as you are told not to. The car will turn over and roll, the roof will crumble.

  ‘Are you going to answer me? We can start tomorrow. This is how you want us, all of the women in your life – devoted and distant. Look at your mum. When did we last see them? You want us to love you, but you remain indifferent. Isolated. Cut off. And you do this.’

  The car will roll through the side barriers, over the verge, into the fields. Nina will be killed next Saturday on her way to Bristol – killed by her impetuous, nasty anger. Never happy with where she’s come from, never happy about where she’s going.

  ‘Do your parents even know you?’

  Then I’ll be left to bring up Rosa alone.

  ‘What efforts has your mother made to get to know me? What has she done? The mother of her grandchild!’

  Viktor saw himself next weekend debating how to tell Rosa; he wouldn’t be a hypocrite, he’d tell her straight and not resort to the false comfort of an afterlife. ‘Dead. Your mother’s dead, sweetheart. Like the pigeon we found in the winter, tangled in the green netting that hung across the balcony. Remember, sweetie, how we buried it, unhooked its extended, broken wings, its claws – and you said that pigeons were lucky because they had wings and legs so they could fly and walk. Nina has died, like that pigeon, sweetheart, she got tangled in the green netting and she’s not coming back. Now it’s only us, you and me.’

  ‘Will we bury her in the garden with the pigeon?’ Rosa would reply.

  ‘No, darling, we can’t do that. We will burn her in an oven until she’s been turned to dust and then we can throw her off the balcony.’

  Rosa would look at her father, her eyes wide, her mouth open; she would be silent for a moment and then smile. ‘Then she’ll be able to fly as well. Walk and fly like the pigeons. She’ll fly off the balcony.’

  ‘She’s made no effort,’ Nina repeated. ‘She just calls to speak to you. And the food parcels, food that we never eat.’

  Viktor had come into the room and now played with his glasses, turned them over in his hands. Nina’s blurred form looked imprecise and distant on the far sofa.

  ‘Your mother’s a bitch.’

  Viktor dropped his glasses to the floor and took two steps towards Nina, his heart pounding in his ears. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘From passive-aggressive to violent! What are you going to do? Hit me? You know if you ever hit me I’ll leave you. I will walk out with Rosa.’

  Viktor breathed in, steadied himself.

  Viktor relaxed his hands, his face drained of colour. He stayed where he was, in the middle of the room, in front of Nina.

  Nina got up, shook her head at Viktor and walked to the bathroom. ‘I’m going to take a Tramadol. Do you have anything to say?’ Viktor was silent. ‘You are as useless as your family.’

  ‘Consider yourself hit,’ Viktor said.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  *

  Biko’s line of communication with the comrades of the north, to Nelson, was through Anne-Marie, the one on-off member of the Society who seemed to understand him. The two spoke nightly. Biko explained the plans, how the movement at NUST in Bulawayo was being organised. Anne-Marie – calm, sanguine, unimpressed – queried his assumptions and goaded him from Harare on the bad lines, calling from her work phone to his mobile. They worked well together.

  The line was bad tonight. Anne-Marie’s voice jumped, broke up. ‘How are you, Biko? Do you need me to send money? You need money to live on, right?’

  Biko laughed loudly and leant against the wall of the squat he shared in Bulawayo. ‘Live? Ha! We don’t really live, comrade. We go for three days without taking anything, but your middle-class sensibilities mustn’t misunderstand the poor: in this medium-density area, with my interpersonal skills, we can always find food.’

  He slapped the concrete wall with a flat hand, his laughter scattering the static.

  ‘There’s a woman – a really conscious, political woman – who is called Magdalene; she steals mealie-meal from her father’s store and gives it to us.’

  Pausing, filling his lungs, raising his voice agai
n: ‘And on bad days, Anne-Marie, we chase locusts to eat. But isn’t this communism? Seriously, no, listen.’

  Anne-Marie was making no objection.

  ‘I do not mean suffering, but Zimbabwe is teaching us something. Life is difficult, right? You should come and try it. How many of us live here, in this place? Fourteen of us at the moment. So if one comrade has something in his pocket, say, fifty dollars, we share it among all of us, without even a question. No hoarding. No silos of wheat for future speculation. And if we have a sympathetic parent and they give us something to eat, we share it.’

  He repeated, ‘Fourteen students staying in a house with three rooms. These are the lessons in communism, not lessons in middle-class society and good behaviour. Not your privatised little talking shops.’

  He stopped, rolled his head on his shoulders, pulled his shoulders back. ‘Anne-Marie, are you there? Are you listening?’

  Anne-Marie burst through the static. She wanted the rhetoric and grandstanding to stop. ‘What are you planning, Biko? You know you can’t, you shouldn’t be making these plans without coordinating with us. With Harare.’ Ridiculously she tapped the phone, tried to shake the earpiece free of dust.

  Biko was serious, he replied quickly – he wanted to show her, and knew that she would tell Nelson that he had planned well, that he was organised, that he was quick and impetuous but not foolish.

  ‘So we have formed mass action committees. These are specialised structures to help in the mass action. Now this is not just at the university. These are mass action committees based in the high-density suburbs, where you can have a street or particular area represented by an action committee. Each committee is there, in every area of the city. Take Trenance. There is an action committee which in turn has other smaller action committees in the broader area. When it comes to the issue of students, what we have done is use our own committees – branches of the Society of Liberated Minds – to disseminate propaganda in the schools and colleges. We go into institutions and distribute fliers, calling for the students to come out, the issues – at the institution level we are dealing with fees, paying fees with grain, exclusions, ZANU corruption. The dictatorship. The parochial and general.’