by Zeilig, Leo;
Biko dried his mouth, breathed in. The night had come. The grey, grainy dusk was now black. He felt a slight breeze lift the bottom of his trousers. ‘We are moving tomorrow.’
Anne-Marie felt her pulse race. She tried to calm herself – to find reassurance in Biko’s description, in the plans, in his permanent excitable calm, but she couldn’t lift the panic from her voice. ‘ZANU-PF, X-Party, will crush you. Mugabe is not going to sit and watch. Come on, Biko, I am not even from Zimbabwe and I have seen Mugabe’s brutality and ruthlessness – he is feared across the region. The killings in Matabeleland in the eighties, crushing the Ndebele community, seven thousand murdered in cold blood. This is your history, Biko, not mine. So he will not sit and watch.’
Steadying herself, she stopped, put her feet on the table, pushed her chair back, looked around the apartment. ‘Biko, I am just saying, exercise extreme caution in terms of how you are going to move.’
Biko was more serious now. ‘It depends dialectically on the participation of the populace of Bulawayo. I personally am expecting a high turnout. The situation in the city is difficult; at the university repression has increased to an almost unbearable level. So people are going to react, but the level of state reaction is going to affect us directly. Mugabe is not simply going to watch. I will be extremely cautious, like a good comrade.’
Biko stopped suddenly, then laughed loudly. ‘We don’t speak enough about faith. Have faith in me, Anne-Marie, it’s not the revolution we are starting tomorrow – just the prelude. Just the first shots. Tell Nelson, tell Lenin, that it’s in hand – tomorrow Bulawayo takes over from Harare, like Petrograd took over from Moscow in 1917. And that, like all things, life will come from the margins. From the margins of the margins.’
‘Biko! Goddamn it, Biko – just take it easy tomorrow.’
Chapter Six
The day after the row followed the usual pattern. Rosa was dropped at school; Viktor left the marking in a pile on the floor next to his threadbare slippers and dressing gown. Nina took the day off and they made up in Wood Green shopping centre and drank coffee, shopped, caught the first matinee at the cinema and came out thirty minutes before they needed to pick up Rosa, who would run out of the school and into their arms. Their rows and the debts that were drowning the family followed each other, what felt like the entire economy of north-east London sustained on shopping trips triggered by their arguments.
‘You look gorgeous in that, sweetie,’ Viktor said from his slumped position on the floor in the changing room. Nina had squeezed into the cubicle, a bundle of clothes picked out in the deserted shop. Viktor, his head numb from their row and the long, sleepless night, couldn’t concentrate on the newspaper. Instead he waited for Nina to try on the outfits they had chosen together.
‘These,’ he called out across the shop, ‘would look wonderful on you.’
‘Okay, I’ll try. Do you really think so?’
‘Yes, perfect. They’re very eighties sportswear. Funky. American Apparel.’ How the hell did he even know the names for these styles? Did he understand what ‘funky’ meant? Still, he got it right. Despite his bespectacled erudition and ankle-swingers, Viktor knew what colours, fit, shapes and cuts would work on Nina’s short, curved body. The cubicle door swung open and Nina came out. The collarless tight grey T-shirt exposed her cleavage and traced the contours of her breasts, and the pink leggings and black boots clung to her legs.
‘Riding chic?’ Viktor exclaimed. ‘You’re breaking out of your pigeonhole! It’s such a relief to see you in pink, and that you can at last put away some of your blacks and greys. We’ve discovered something here, darling.’
‘Thanks, sweetie. Are you sure?’
‘Completely. If you don’t buy them, I will.’
The staff would stare in awe, occasionally join in the pantomime: ‘You are so lucky to have a husband who supports you in your shopping. Mine is terrible.’ Night drew over the short day, turning the early afternoon into dusk.
The accusations from the previous night faded.
Viktor carried Nina’s bag. The pink leggings made her look absurd, like a jockey or a pole dancer, yet he had insisted on buying them. Now he felt sick – certain, after slow mental calculation, that he had spent more than his overdraft. What can I sell? The bicycle. The bicycle with the child’s seat that he had, to his own surprise, managed to fit – Rosa had cried with joy as they freewheeled downhill, the wind puffing out their coats, their open mouths filling with air. Or the computer? My phone? That’s it, I will sell the computer and use the one in the office. Stupid, now he thought about it, that he had his own laptop – and that everyone did. What needless waste. The thought cheered him; he would sell it for £150, enough to pay for Nina’s leggings, the cinema tickets, Rosa’s new school shoes.
They walked through the car park, around cars and shopping trolleys. ‘We’ve really achieved something today,’ Viktor said, one hand holding the bags and the other around Nina’s shoulder.
‘Haven’t we, darling,’ she replied.
*
Worse than his endless pondering, his life procrastination, the ceaseless zigzags, was the dizzying white-knuckle ride Viktor inflicted on others – on Nina, on Rosa. A year before Rosa was born and five years before the final, absolute separation, he had ended the relationship.
The first time they had sex after he returned, Nina said, ‘I haven’t had orgasms like that for ages.’ Sex had been easy. They moved into each other’s bodies, laughing and touching as though they hadn’t been apart. They had come quickly in one position. Viktor’s fingers on her clitoris as she sat on top of him. Even if he had come too soon – the old problem, the ancient sickness – it hadn’t mattered. They lay in each other’s arms afterwards, the condom hanging off his penis, its extended knob full of semen.
In the sleepless night, on the first day back, the words that she had uttered about her easy, strong climax leapt back to him, sharp and clear as an alarm. He was already awake, but he now started with a jolt. ‘I haven’t had orgasms like that’ – he repeated the words as he remembered them, searched for hidden meaning. Did this mean, Viktor asked himself, that an involuntary truth had sprung out of her? Had she been having sex with other men while they’d been apart? Is that what she had meant?
Viktor got out of bed and started to pace around the flat.
He listed the reasons why this new nightmare could not be true. She would have had to produce a life of Houdini-like complexity to have covered up fucking someone else. On her first night back she had sat on their balcony with an electric razor, shaving her calves of their long black hair. She had not performed any differently during their sex; Nina was the same lover. Most importantly she had told Viktor earnestly that she wanted to marry him, that she wanted children and that she wanted them to stop using condoms. All of this he kept repeating to himself, like a religious oath.
Viktor came back to bed and saw her lying curled up, her back to him. She turned to him. ‘I love you, sweetie,’ she muttered, her voice thick with sleep but soft and sweet. ‘Come here. Is there anything I need to tell you?’ He lay down, surrendering to her arms. ‘Do we need to silence those chattering voices?’
He muttered a small ‘Yes.’
‘Here, let me hold your head.’ She raised herself, lifted her hands and pressed her fingers against his forehead. ‘There,’ she said, ‘all gone.’ She turned back onto her side, her back to him, and pulled his arm around her, placing his hand on her breast, pushing her thighs and buttocks into his groin.
The last thought Viktor had before he fell asleep was Does it even matter if she did? She was here now and had given herself completely to their plans, to him. She had taken him back.
But two days later those words came to him again: ‘I haven’t had orgasms like that for ages.’ The hymn of reassurances was wearing thin – and the simple, likely possibility that she might have been masturbating didn’t even occur to him.
How could he believe Nina again
if every time he asked her, with mock sincerity, to tell him everything, there was a new revelation? What did he want her to tell him? How often she had fucked and not told him? About that drunken, steamy night in Paris, years ago, when she was propositioned by a young – far too young – man who then introduced her to his friend and they got talking? Though this had happened before they were dating, it felt to him like duplicity; the very existence of her sexual life independent from him was a betrayal. ‘It was one of those silly things,’ she’d said, ‘when you want to tick something off the list. The threesome felt so wrong, like porn,’ she said. You watch pornography? Viktor thought. Another item from her list. Wasn’t this a male fantasy – erotic dreams of girlfriends starring in duplicitous fuckathons?
We reassure ourselves that these fantasies are just the nightmares of our addled, wanton male brains, Viktor thought, but it is not true. We really are being deceived. They really are fucking.
What did Viktor even want? Did he want to feel bad? For his guts, his innards, to tremble? Perversely, he would have felt disappointed if he had not visited the underground pool that flowed quickly with the detritus of old memories. He needed to seek out that ancient sabotage and pain. With Nina Viktor felt alive, vital, only when he could reach into those buried waters and feel the jostling current breaking around his body.
He had become so overwhelmed that he concocted a solution to this fantasy infidelity, one that seemed to him both absurd and sure. He would have to fuck his way equal. Initially he thought it would only take one incident, though soon he realised that he would have to take into account the fact that she had probably screwed this man, this lover, continually for a few weeks – good solid fucking for at least two weeks. He would, in turn, have to make his calculation. At night Viktor shifted in bed, put his arm over Nina’s sideward body. Who could I find? Someone for quick, uncomplicated sex, someone like me, determined to get revenge, to equal up the relationship so we can love again with the old stability and parity, both bloated on half-truths. He imagined the Nepali barista in the coffee booth with the thick, brown birthmark that stretched up her arm. He imagined them fucking on the counter with the shutter half down, takeaway cups and white lids falling to the floor, the ankles and shoes of commuters scurrying past. The thought pleased Viktor and almost cajoled him back to sleep.
*
Loneliness pulsed and throbbed in Biko and yet he – this man of great vision – did not see it. His loneliness was a craving for the past, for his family, for things which could never be recovered – for the time when his father was younger and Biko would stand by him at the end of the day, after they had eaten, and hear him speak about his own childhood, receive his bristled kisses. Or when he was a little older and running errands for his mother around the township. His need to be with his parents, to find himself in their presence, for them to crowd him, left him despising his own weakness. It drove him to work harder, to focus more on the tasks of now.
He had been a peculiar son. For an entire year his mother had won special dispensation from her husband to allow little Stephan to sleep in their room, at the bottom of their bed – it was years later, at university, that Stephan became simply ‘Biko’ and gave a second life to the murdered South African activist. His father grumbled and agreed. For the first weeks Biko slept, like a cat or dog, curled at their feet, his cover drawn tightly round him, a hand under their blanket holding onto his mother’s ankle. Each concession was never enough; somehow he had clawed his way off the floor, into their bed, into their intimacy. And now sleep wasn’t possible, for this inadequate seven-year-old, except through communion with his mother’s leg.
‘This can’t go on. It mustn’t go on,’ Emmerson said one morning at the end of the first week of their threesome. ‘He wants something from us that we can’t give. He is finding his way between us, until soon he will lie right here,’ he patted the spot next to him in the bed, ‘and still it won’t be enough, he will want more. He wants to climb right back inside both of us. We need to teach him to separate, or he’ll start to resent us – he needs you to be firm. We mustn’t spoil him, this child of independence, this born-free.’
Emmerson was right. Biko burrowed back into his parents, his hand creeping up his mother’s leg until they woke one morning, in the second week of his migration to their bedroom, with his head peering over their cover, his lithe, willowy body squirming between them like an eel. His love for his parents was like hunger.
So a new bed was made up on the floor. Biko slept on pillows dragged every night into his parents’ room. In her apron Biko’s mother would kneel on the floor, panting, pressing the cushions together with a sheet, arranging the bed for their difficult son. The hard labour of the meal was hers, from washing the dishes in the plastic tub with soap and the garden hose to cooking the sadza, cutting the cheap, sinewy meat and frying it with onion. Each evening when the meal was finally served, the bubbles of perspiration on her forehead, Biko wondered how he could lessen the burden of his mother’s crippling labour.
Now Biko worried that he was the source of her hardship, the reason she was constantly bent over the gas hob where she cooked for the family, and now over the bed she made for him every night in her room. His efforts to help were angrily chased away.
Lying on the floor of their room, away from their touch, his intimacy with his parents grew. It seemed to him as though he was being allowed to enter something entirely forbidden to children, some secret world of adult intimacy, the mystery of his parents’ conversations and their physical union. He noticed how simple-minded was their trust. Now that he was on the floor and out of sight, they did not think of him and spoke freely, thinking their boy was asleep or, even if he wasn’t, that he would not understand them. Do they think I am like the dog, like our inja who sleeps in the dust on the veranda? Do they think I can’t understand them?
Several nights after his bed was made on their floor, he realised that their freedom to speak as though he wasn’t present was not their underestimation of children, it was nothing so sophisticated: his parents were just exhausted. When he was not an actual presence, in front of them, between them, demanding their contact and love, he was rendered temporarily invisible.
From his floor hideout he discovered something even more devastating: that, despite the seemingly matter-of-fact relationship between his parents, which appeared to him like the arrangement of amatshe, the stones in the fields circling the township, what actually held them together was an entirely voluntary arrangement based on love. This revelation terrified Biko. Love? Love seemed to cast the entire edifice of his family life into the realm of terrible vulnerability. What if something happened to his father, who spoke in such soft, gentle tones to his mother, in words that made Biko sit up in his bed the first time he heard him and wonder who had crept into the room to love his mother? Kulungile thandiwe, khathesi, ngizakulala njengengwenya.
And his mother’s confident teasing, her control of his father: ‘You look like a crocodile when you have been asleep.’
‘Maybe I am a crocodile – with a great hunger.’ Biko heard the bed creak.
‘And what are you going to do with that great hunger, old man? Do you still have the strength to swim in the water? Amandla ethu njengengwenya emanzini ayesemphakathini.’
The bed creaked and Biko felt his concentration sharpen, his pulse quickening. He worried that his parents would hear his heart pounding.
‘Come here,’ his mother ordered his father.
Biko, only slightly taller than the end of the bed, stood silently and stared at his parents as they made love. Rolling and tumbling on each other, his mother in charge – wielding his father on her, under her, instructing him silently, with Biko watching, breathless, at the end of the bed.
When it was over his father would always speak in Ndebele, not in the Elizabethan English he used when he taught, when he gave orders to Biko: ‘Ngiyakuthanda.’ His mother would respond, ‘I love you too, my crocodile.’
Bik
o would fall back into his bed as satisfied as his parents, disturbed by their need for each other, realising for the first time what was at stake in his family and in the world.
Despite the relative wealth of the family, fed for more than two decades on Emmerson’s work in Bulawayo High School and for almost ten years by his role as principal, they lived modestly. His father’s retreat from politics, measured in reverse proportion to his son’s growing political preoccupation, left Biko with only the austerity he had practised as a young man. Austerity became his new creed. And as Biko grew older, his anger at his mother’s labour was only tempered by what he now knew of his parents’ real relationship.
‘Father, why don’t we buy a proper stove and a new sofa? Why don’t we have a maid to help Mother?’
His father dropped his school bag on the floor, poured himself a mug of cheap red wine and fell onto the veranda sofa, the day ringing in his ears. ‘What?’
Biko set up the fan for his father, pulled the cord though the window, turned the dial until the fan head picked up speed. ‘Mother needs help. She does everything herself.’
A smile broke on Emmerson’s face. ‘Such duty as the subject owes the prince, such a woman oweth to her husband.’
Biko felt the blood in his face; he choked, ‘You don’t mean that. I know you don’t. Women owe nothing to men, do they? Do they?’
Taking swigs of the wine, washing down the day, wanting the fog of forgetting to come, Emmerson widened his smile and told Biko to sit next to him. The sun was hazy in its retreat from the sky. On the horizon where it set, over the row of neat brick township houses, light broke through the torn and stretched clouds.
Biko was proud to be invited to sit next to his father, yet he was still angry. His father put his arm around his son’s shoulder and said, ‘You are a good boy, Stephan, you ask the right questions. Never stop asking, my son.’
