An Ounce of Practice

by Zeilig, Leo;

  I let plenty of crappy, childish comments of yours slide. But if I say one thing you react and then leave. You say you love me but I don’t feel it.

  Viktor responded.

  If you think all these things – as I think them of you – we need to split. You don’t want me and I don’t want you. Simple.

  You never take responsibility for your behaviour, it is easier to shift the blame. You do it on all things, Nina.

  Nina’s messages paused for a while. Then:

  I’ve just cut myself by mistake really badly. I am bleeding and think need stitches. Please come and get me. Must I phone my mum? I can’t leave Rosa.

  Viktor: You self-harmed. I will pick you up.

  Nina: No, my friend’s coming. I called her.

  Viktor: Whatever.

  Nina: Exactly, you couldn’t care less, I know. I wish you could have loved me.

  Viktor: I wish you had a modicum of self-understanding.

  Nina: Please come home this eve. Please don’t stay away.

  Viktor: I will leave the car and stay elsewhere, until there is some calm.

  Nina: Please don’t, Viktor. Please. I’m begging you. I wish I could rewind to this afternoon and do differently.

  Viktor: Nina, I am going to spend the night out to clear my head and calm down a bit.

  Nina: Where are you staying? Can I come over? I know you need to clear your head but I need to see you.

  A few hours later they took up the fight all over again – sweeping their fists back and forth, catching everything in their path. When this was done, exhausted, Viktor turned his phone to silent and tried to sleep. In the morning he saw the messages Nina had sent in the night.

  Please answer.

  When you leave like this I have only my own thoughts and they are very scary.

  I feel punished and rejected.

  I just want to be loved and supported. I feel so alone. I have been alone for months with you, longer and now again. I just want to be loved.

  Do I not deserve that? Am I not good enough? Maybe you have found someone else. Is that why you are always late from university?

  I hate myself. I wish I was dead.

  I don’t blame you for abandoning me.

  I deserve it.

  I wish I was dead.

  Viktor cracked the curtains, letting the grey morning fall on him and cast a line of light on the bed. He sat up in bed and picked up his phone to break the hours of silence.

  I never wanted to hurt you but I do think our connection is hurtful to both of us. I want that to end. I think we are at the end of the road – as much as I love you.

  There were a few moments of silence. Viktor could hear his parents stirring, his father’s feet shuffling on the bedroom floor, foraging for his slippers, and his mother’s morning words, ‘Isaac, dear, are you going to make the tea?’

  The phone buzzed again. Nina.

  I feel angry and hurt. You wasted years of my life. I wish you had just let me go so I could give you up and let go. I am angry you kept me close and we had Rosa. You kept me close and never committed and now you say it’s over. I am angry for staying true to our plans and to Rosa. I betrayed myself.

  Viktor responded: It’s over. Go.

  Then he did something unusual. He pressed hard on the phone’s off button, holding his finger in place until the screen shut down. There was a flash of light and then nothing.

  Viktor had turned off his phone. It was the first time this had ever happened.

  Part Two:

  Strikes and Separation

  Chapter Twelve

  The last time they made love it was quick, on the bed, the floor strewn with Nina’s bags, half their clothes still on. Just a three-minute fuck, both of them coming quickly and breathlessly. No tears, no veil of emotion lifted in a final climax, just a perfunctory fuck to mark the end.

  ‘That was nice. Now I will sleep easily,’ Nina had said. Viktor liked that. This was how she always was before an important discussion – hard-nosed and rational. She was difficult, fragmented, when there wasn’t a crisis, but when something actually happened she was always stronger than him. It induced in her a necessity to strip life down to what was absolutely necessary: logistics, raw anger and sex.

  Afterwards Nina had taken Rosa from her room, still asleep, and curled round her in their double bed. After the endless months of doubt, the years this relationship had lasted, tearing them both apart, to Viktor Nina was saying that she was inseparable from Rosa. The lie of their individual units was exposed finally that night by this simple motherly act; Rosa came from her, was cleaved of her flesh, from her body, and her home would always be with her mother.

  Viktor scrambled to get Nina back, pleaded to her in emails, fought her doubts with furious, eloquent reassurances. No more questioning, complete combination of their lives, everything that had been wrong would be, through decisions that were now being made, put right. At the start of this renunciation of his past, his old crimes, his sickness, his incapacity, he had felt cleansed, as though he was being truly honest with himself for the first time. This public flogging felt redemptive. He could start again – if he could only believe, utterly, completely in this latest resolution – clear and cleaned.

  Nina had accepted his apology at first and said he could come back, then haggled almost every day, creating new, exhausting conditions: another child, a house with a garden, marriage, double-barrelling their names, joining Jew and Gentile. The list was long: reconciliation, unity, togetherness, an unambiguous and committed universe.

  But she didn’t want him back.

  *

  For three months after Viktor and Nina separated he slept in his parents’ spare room. There were two shelves above the single bed. The top shelf contained items from his childhood: a soft brown bear, a duck with a yellow beak and a navy-blue waistcoat knitted by his mother, an encyclopedia. The lower shelf in the spare room was allocated to Amy, the relics of her childhood selected by Sonia: a plastic doll with moving eyes, one permanently cast down in a hideous wink; a boxed set of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia; a chipped mirror ringed by a pink frame of forget-me-nots.

  ‘Mum, why do you still have those silly things in the spare room? They look eerie, as though you’re waiting for the urns with our ashes, to finish the commemoration once we’re dead,’ Viktor said.

  ‘Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die.’

  To avoid the sadness when he entered the room, the reminder of the many deaths he and his sister had inflicted on their parents, on themselves and each other, the phases of lost childhood, adolescence, adulthood, Viktor covered the two shelves with a large towel.

  Nothing seemed to please and distress his parents more than having Viktor under their care for a few months. He stretched out on the spare bed, his feet hanging over the end, his hands behind his head, and heard Isaac shuffle into the bathroom in his slippers. He didn’t want to listen, to hear the routine – always a routine with his father – the muted song from Rigoletto or La Traviata as he sat on the toilet for his evening bowel movement, straining and singing. He raised his voice, the tune high and loud, as he squeezed and pushed, then abruptly lowered into a baritone with a moan as he reached satisfaction. Viktor frowned. The sound of his father was eternal, the same movements, only slower now. Viktor remembered sitting at his father’s feet, staring up at him as he shaved.

  Twice Viktor had been woken by the sound of his parents making love. Shocked, he had thought at first that he was still asleep. He had turned on the bedside light, but the arc of pale light over the bed only confirmed the darkness and amplified the soft groans of his parents rhythmically fucking along the corridor. On the second occasion he was woken, his parents’ tired, hollow bodies reaching perfect harmony, Viktor masturbated himself back to sleep and thought how like death is the sound of love. How like the noises I made with Nina. Life, he supposed, is always made with death – climactic, wordless beginnings and speechless groans at the end. />
  He sat up in the bed, wondered if for another night he would have to sleep over the blanket, because the heating, which sapped his father’s meagre pension and their sleep, remained at 24 degrees day and night, winter and summer.

  *

  Anne-Marie wasn’t entirely clear what it was she wanted any more.

  Anne-Marie didn’t want kids, of this she had always been clear, but at a certain age – she could chart it, she’d just turned thirty – the chorus rose, the shouts (sometimes it was actually shouting) had become so loud that she was no longer entirely sure what it was that she wanted.

  What right, she would rage, do they have to tell me what I need and think? And why do they always shout? My family is like the whole of the Congo, she thought, terrified that it will be snuffed out so the people have to roar, toujours hurler. Such fear of non-existence, such fear of death, these people. She received calls at regular intervals from her grandmother – of all people – her mother, her aunts and uncles, until she began to feel that it was her duty, her mission, as a member of the Patrice Lumumba clan, to reproduce.

  Her uncle, a remote figure in her life, had made a lucrative living on his father’s name. ‘The Lumumbas,’ he’d said, patiently, forthrightly, ‘are the country’s, the continent’s, most successful family.’ How could he say this without irony? ‘But, Anne-Marie, our future is précaire because our numbers have fallen dramatically. Some believe that the answer is to forget our history, our heritage, our name, in other words to rewrite the rules, to forget, but I don’t. You need, we need, children, in our name.’ On how exactly this name was to come about, her uncle was not precise. ‘And Anne-Marie,’ he said after a pause, taking a sip of morning-warmed Primus, ‘I am prepared to step in to fund fertility treatment if necessary. I know a clinic in Paris. You need children, we do.’

  There were many aspects to the calls which horrified Anne-Marie. The concern this sloshed, permanently incoherent uncle had given to their name – what did she care, the surname she had long ditched was to her a burden, evidence of failure, the continent’s most successful family – oh, Uncle, in that case pity the continent, pity our people. His attachment to the name, the only thing his father had given him, was a sort of salve to his personal failures, collapsed business ventures, money borrowed on the back of the legacy – of the family name – his political organisation (Mouvement National Congolais – Lumumba, le deuxième) that thought it could reproduce Patrice’s programme, reprint it word for word to reach the promised horizon. Each one of these ventures, each racket, had failed and his latest absurdity was IVF-ing the continent full of Lumumbas.

  Beyond her family’s efforts were others – comments, casual, almost polite, about her age, her needs. Office colleagues would enquire with a wink, a squeeze of her shoulder, about children – always when, never if. It was a mystery to her that these comments came from people she didn’t know, with the presumption that somehow they could ask her about children and touch her at the same time. From the woman who sold her breakfast, a single orange, at a pavement stall on Tongogara, it was never a single child but children. The woman put her hands on her hips, swayed, knowing, familiar – pointing her finger in the direction of Anne-Marie’s midriff, nodding: ‘Where you will sit when you are old shows where you stood in youth.’ What did that even mean, exactly?

  How was she to escape this pressure without going mad, without doubting what she had never doubted? People she barely knew told her that to be full, complete, to be fulfilled and known, she needed not a single child but a flock, a gaggle, a fucking herd of children. Nothing could satisfy the desire for children, for the wheels to turn, for life to be given and then taken, for sense to be made of life; it was an appetite that no reason, no sense, no desire could appease. Congo’s gods of the sky, of the earth, of the river would never be satisfied.

  And Anne-Marie didn’t know what to do. All the things in her life that had felt private – her decisions, her body – became claimed, with a hideous clamour, by everyone else. Was it possible, she wondered, battered (and it was a battering) by the pressure of so many fingers and opinions, to escape society? To reject its demands for conformity and order? Younger, more confident – she was now thirty-eight – she would not even have understood the question. Perhaps this was the secret of youth. Now she knew it wasn’t ever entirely possible, and that to try too thoroughly was to risk your own sanity and hold on the world. Anne-Marie realised that in small measures it was possible to survive in the cracks, in the twilight of the rules. She already lived alone in Harare, travelled unaccompanied on the continent, kept her lovers at a distance.

  Nelson was going to be different; he was going to break the mould. Yet, exuding rejection of the crippling project of ZANU’s dictatorship, the neoliberal nightmare that had destroyed Zimbabwe and capitalism’s centuries-old project on the continent, he bumbled in matters of personal relations. To the pressure to settle with Anne-Marie and have children, he seemed to suspend his harsh judgements of the existing social order and agree. Perhaps they should have children. Although they never explicitly discussed the subject – like all things in their relationship, it was casually ‘present’ – he assumed that they would amble into parenthood. Anne-Marie would be the parent and he would continue to speak and organise and turn young comrades into cadre at his knee – or take care of the children on weekends. Only in this respect was he utterly vague and unquestioning.

  With Viktor, she hoped, or intended, things to be different – children were not his project; his child seemed to be his predicament. In an abstract way Viktor was already her ally, and she did not press him on the details of his dilemma and the particular commotion of his life because of the complications in her own. There was an unspoken solidarity between them. Viktor understood her and, strangely, even in their deepest moments of intimacy, they did not discuss children or plans, their particular, strange relationship cartography. Viktor knew that in the desperate stakes of life perhaps the most she could expect from society, from her family, was to be left the fuck alone.

  *

  Comrade Viktor!

  Thanks – again – for your (far, FAR too) kind words. And given that you are going thru a personal hell (which I’ve had to a couple of times) it’s only natural for comrades to be at least supportive in communication and in person. If what I write helps inspire too, then so much the better. After all, all such ‘hell on earth’ is produced by bosses’ conscious competitive accumulation – the source of all exploitation, oppression, inequality and suffering. There is no other force ‘organising’ this – not even wild nature – which we could, long ago, put into a tamed form. But this is not even on the capitalist agenda, far from it. They’re wrecking that too.

  As I have said before, if a room here would suit you, of course I and my little circle would make you warmly welcome – and I’m sure you’d enjoy all the rich debate/arguments and promise among these marvellous young thinkers, struggling their way through the increasingly tangled coils of the vile UK capitalist reptile.

  On the political situation, I think the overall ‘literary’ type of keynote of our times is: Tout – ça change and de plus en plus ça change! No force on earth – whatever the West and its remaining despots in Africa do – can eradicate now the fresh refounding of the distinctive fundamental principles of revolutions which so enriched it. In the newly awakening minority epitomised by the struggle at the university, we have found a new spirit to forge the future.

  ALL the thousands of honest, genuine, sincere, real socialists who joined organisations, as I did in Zimbabwe, to learn, organise and lead the people to full international armed insurrectionary seizure of all power – must drink deep at the oases, those wonderful, still young, rampaging revolutions of the poor of Africa and Arabia. And this, Viktor, can only come with practice – YOU have to DRINK.

  Drink very deep indeed, Viktor – with an alert mind – to check that what you are doing, supporting and ‘going along with’ is even remotely rel
ated to those oases and founts of the actuality of revolution and the sole source of our theory – the actual, sensuous, flesh-and-blood revolutionary practical-critical activity. DRINK, comrade, DRINK.

  That wonderful goddess History tantalised me by waiting till I was 60, with years of training, to deliver three revolutions in one northern winter – so far, more to come. So, all my life HAS been a preparation. The people are awakening. Stay tuned.

  Sala kakuhle Viktor!

  Tendai

  *

  Viktor didn’t know what to make of Tendai’s emails, nor did he fully understand how these messages were so radically different from the conversations they had at university. Cajoling, irritated and provocative, Tendai raged at Viktor, tried to work him up, move him on, get him to break from his congenital impotence. Gnawed, knotted Tendai would stand over his dustcart, a streak of dirt across his face, his bottom lip pouting, turned out, spitting forth his words. ‘Get going, man, goddamn it. Break the habit of a lifetime and move. MOVE.’ Viktor aroused the exasperation of the gods and ancestors, uThixo and uDali, and made Tendai angry. And what was so goddamn likeable about this hopeless man anyway, this splinter of wood?

  Forever seeking the kernel, the real core, the point at which transformation comes, some budding contradiction, Tendai recognised in Viktor the necessity to burst the shell and get to the heart. The real thing. ‘You, you, you are shut up, enclosed, trapped in this, this capsule, this case, this container, a hull, a husk, a shell, a false vessel.’ No word ever seemed to fit. Viktor’s eyes widening in horror, all of this for him, these words, this effort, these attempts – to provoke him to break from his inertia and get to his ripe, seething, fraught heart. To the damn truth. Tendai tried everything, in the day when he felt charged, angry and alive, when he had the force – and he felt keenly the memory of his lost years in Pollsmoor, his enforced absence – he hit, kneaded and coaxed Viktor; physically tried to grasp the carapace of Viktor’s resistance and wrench it away, remove it to reveal what he knew was beneath.