An Ounce of Practice Read online

  PRAISE

  ‘A beautiful haunting tale out of Africa that weaves love and politics, politics and love, and desire that overwhelms’ ASHWIN DESAI, author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire

  ‘Leo Zeilig reveals the full complexity, beauty, richness and contradictions of a life of political commitment, internationalism and struggle. Karl Marx once wrote to a comrade that we must engage in “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be” Despite heartache, failings and other all-too-human qualities, Zeilig’s characters embody that spirit and determination.’ ANTHONY ARNOVE, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal

  ‘An Ounce of Practice paints a compelling picture of the desperate world of migrants and émigrés drawn to the flickering flame of revolt despite the tsunami of neoliberalism. Leo Zeilig has delved deep, with a cold eye and a warm wit into the passions and motivations of his cast of committed but troubled characters.’

  COLIN FANCY, author of Crocodiles Don’t Brush Their Teeth

  ‘An Ounce of Practice tells a gripping and affective tale of global radical politics, love, and life in the virtual realm of the Internet. … [P]olitically and emotionally intelligent, authentic, intensely complex, and humane. With this vivid work Leo Zeilig has placed himself firmly as a momentous writer of the predicament of radical politics and imagination in today’s world’.HEIKE BECKER - University of the Western Cape,Anthropology

  ‘Leo Zeilig’s second novel brims with longing and loss, stretching from the intimate failures of the family to the burning urgency of political resistance in Zimbabwe. Zeilig asks what it means in an age of digital activism and sex by text, to attempt to live truly and fully. In his fusion of the personal and the political, Zeilig refuses to look away, pointing the reader’s gaze right at the uncomfortable and forcing us to admit our weaknesses. This is fiction that does not lie’ SARAH GREY

  ‘This passionate, sad and well-told book offers a compelling portrait of a flawed young radical.’ Guardian (review of Eddie the Kid)

  An Ounce of Practice

  Leo Zeilig

  For Tafadzwa Choto

  Prologue

  Viktor looked vague and ponderous. His high forehead and dark, thinning hair and round glasses confirmed that he was always brooding on possibilities, options, the world’s ceaseless, never-ending negations. His creased eyes fooled you that he laughed, but really they spoke of his worry, his dilemmas and indecisions. To his secret shame, his eyes were blue and pierced the world with light, with exclamation. If Viktor’s face, his thin shoulders and tall, hooked frame said one thing it was maybe. The doubt, always present in his overwrought, tortured decisions, spread over his entire build; now his body was the shape of these misgivings. In his curved torso, his head hanging bent on his neck and shoulders, his legs loose and apart, Viktor looked as though he was about to disappear, break up – as if he was going to dissolve back into non-existence.

  He sat on a towpath bench just outside London, his bag wedged behind his back. He stared at the wide, blue, improbable sky that pressed down on the buildings and fell between the detached houses along the towpath. Today the sky was the indisputable arbiter, marking out the planes, the tiles on the roofs, the still, sealed water’s edge. In the steady blue of the omnipotent sky and the reflective green of the water, Viktor thought he could make the decision to leave Nina and Rosa.

  He rehearsed the arguments but, like the last rehearsal and the one before that, it left him more indecisive. The confidence he had felt in the morning, scribbling in his notebook, drinking his coffee, had evaporated in the spring sun. Perhaps this a.m. drug was the only way he could make decisions, rising and crashing on the waves of hope that the morning fix of caffeine gave him, the rush of blood to his head that made him feel for ten minutes as though he could conquer his predicaments, take a step into the world free of the pain and panic of transition.

  ‘Get into your comfy clothes, sweetie,’ Viktor had called to Nina as he left Rosa after her second story the previous evening. She had put her small head on his shoulders, her clammy hand resting against his chest under his shirt, her already unusually long black hair pulled forward over her chest and T-shirt. He inhaled her childish, sweet smell. When he stood after the story was finished, having skipped pages and rushed to the end, she had reached up for him. Viktor bent further over her in their night-time routine, and with her sweaty hand she gently removed his glasses, held them aloft, and, with her other hand on his cheek, they touched their noses very lightly and stared into each other’s eyes. Viktor looked with amazement at Rosa’s wide, black, round eyes as she stared back into his blue ones. Then after a second, as they did every night, at the same time, she emitted a single order: ‘Kiss.’ She would kiss him on his lips and stay there, mouth against mouth, for a few seconds. The kiss would leave them both comforted, ready to confront the night.

  Their nights – the one that he faced today, in a few hours – made him long for Rosa’s embrace when he returned, for her thin, ardent arms around his neck. From here he saw the whole evening: not a series of dramatic rows but Nina, standing so straight, her square shoulders and ivory neck, the cardigan zipped over her naked chest and arms. Always her cardigans, worn, Viktor thought, like sacred gowns. Even in bed the cardigan would come off only at the end of the late reading, hoisted over her shoulders, the quick, expert movements under the cover, until the garment was discarded and thrown on the floor as though it had not meant anything to her. It felt like a lie, that this zipped-up sweater was meaningless, when in fact it was everything: her adjustable shield against the world, proof of her agency in life, cloth evidence of being, somehow, in control.

  Viktor smiled at this thought, moved his weight on the bench, the boards pressing into him. He recalled the feel of her skin, that first touch in bed after she had finally relinquished all protection, the slow, assured movement of their naked bodies against each other, to find a position to sleep together or the decision, unspoken, to make love.

  This spiral of thoughts had started just when he needed confidence in his decision to leave her. He knew he wanted a break. I must concentrate on the rows. The rows. How they make me feel. What they turn us into. What Rosa sees. The rows. It was too late already. His mind forced him back to the bed, to Nina, his body curled against her, his hand draped over her, holding onto her breast. The meals together, delicately prepared, presented to Viktor and Rosa. Somehow it had ended up like this, despite their efforts; Nina cooked, proclaiming loudly on pans and plates while Viktor, when he was available, took Rosa through her evening ablutions. Viktor stacked the plates in the kitchen cupboard, adjusted the towels on the radiator in the bathroom and arranged into a semblance of order the arc of toys on Rosa’s floor. Nina was the director of the family’s domesticity, their tragic financial affairs, the meticulously budgeted shopping, Rosa’s entire edifice of clothes, schooling, lunches and the supply of reliable and consistent love. Despite everything, this is what they had become. The couple had only managed to dislodge themselves momentarily from the gendered routine of household labour for them to fall again, almost imperceptibly, into the habitual groove of life.

  Expectant and hungry, with their knives and forks held up, erect, Viktor egging Rosa on, the two of them lightly hammering the table, Rosa leading the chant: ‘Where’s our food? Where’s our food?’ Rosa clamoured with excitement, her eyes ablaze, nothing else around her except the pleasure of this dinner table anarchy, sanctified by her father, amusing her mother. Nothing else, for these minutes. Rosa’s mispronunciation slurred the words into a rhythmic, tuneful spell.

  Viktor’
s black shirt stuck to his arms; he felt a trickle of sweat. He tried once more to reorientate his thinking from these images of domestic joy, to find his way back to what he knew, to what he wanted. It was that kiss, he thought, Rosa’s kiss, that caught him, tripped him up, hurled him from the decision that he thought he could finally make on the towpath. That kiss.

  Viktor undid two buttons on his shirt and bellowed the warm air across his body. A young man in a polo shirt sat on the bench next to him. He was thin, gaunt, his legs bowed. Viktor glanced quickly at his profile; the man’s nose grew from his forehead into a steep, sharp, dramatic beak. All Viktor could see was the man’s oversized nose – his face was entirely obliterated by his ridiculous proboscis. Viktor turned back quickly as though he had just seen the man’s penis protruding, unbound, from his unbuttoned trousers. My god, that poor man, he thought. His life has been entirely determined by his jutting, absurd knife of a nose. Overdetermined. Viktor wanted to cross the two feet separating them to console him, put his arm around him and tell him that everything would be okay, from one nose to another. What was this emotion? Pity? Hooter solidarity?

  Viktor mopped his moist head with his hand, moving it in big strokes across his face, then wiped his hand on his cotton trousers. He shook his head free once more of distractions and tried to corral his thoughts again towards the dilemma. If he left Nina, he knew that he would be leaving not their ugly, weekly rows, but their glorious laughter, the sex, her love for him, his for her.

  The man next to him on the bench shifted slightly against the wooden slats. From this angle Viktor could see his full face, the nose no longer a separate appendage. Instead the nose was nicely, evenly balanced by bright, large eyes, his lashes dark and long. He had a full mouth and dimpled chin. Together they made his face look palatial and interesting. He wondered if it was a family nose, passed on through generations of migration, haphazard fucking, domestic joy.

  Viktor stared at his companion unblinking and the man smiled back. I could easily kiss him, Viktor thought.

  On this excursion into the sunshine, to the one place in this city not blighted by traffic, where Viktor was sure he could make a decision, he had fallen in love with a stranger’s nose. The contradictory, complex parts of the world assembled into one impossible and beautiful whole.

  *

  Comrade!

  I have just read the article you just published on Mutations. It is one of the best for weeks and months, and written with real revolutionary principle and passion – no surprise that it was written by a Botswanan, and not by the English, Western chicken-shit professors, heads and second managers who often seem to write for your site. What a refreshing breath of pure oxygen! The Botswanan is a REAL red fighter. No qualms, hesitations or vacillations or left lurches of the English mediocre type. Marvellous. I am pleased you took me up on the suggestion and contacted him.

  And of course, ‘the centrality of the working class’ is the focus of the article. And what a working class! I remember researching the awful decades of shit these workers have been subjected to by their Western-imposed and, still, armed and backed rulers – fantastic. The power to change the world, smash capital and liberate all.

  There is a deep personal thrill reading this article, as it is partly my handiwork. I recruited the comrade years ago in Harare. What a legacy, my friend.

  Anyway, keep up the good work and keep looking south.

  Tendai

  *

  Biko, Biko, Biko – you could no more say his name once than you had to speak it three times, make it a chant, shout it. Biko was a declaration. A siren. It needed to be shouted in meetings, in the crowded lecture theatres, in the city, uttered when others were speaking. Biko! The man, thirty-three – a biblical fact that escaped no one – finishing his second degree, raging, declaring, always speaking, always against the world.

  Biko stood against this world, these dusty streets, the townships, the broken-down, ridiculous university, the whole towering, collapsing edifice, the streets and paths, the lines of life that connected the country and city he had inherited. The brutality and dictatorship, each part of it, every path that led to every shack, every paved, swept road that led to a new breeze-block palace, each imported, polished window on each new building in Harare, every fresh crack, each fissure of decay, every broken life, lost job, desiccated hope – on every street corner, in the idle loitering of the young and old, in the agony of loss (the only word that could confront Biko’s own will, that could suck the air from the great expanse of his name, the effortless spread of his generosity and will and vision) – in all of these places, Biko was there.

  Either he was actually there – and he often was actually there – or he was metaphorically present, using these upended, broken pavements to preach and teach. To read. To appeal for action. In between courses he taught for absent lecturers and professors, in between the endless in-betweens when the university was shut because there was no power or water or there was a strike, Biko could be found on street corners. This was Biko. He had as much freedom of movement as running water, gushing in torrents along the gutter, out of broken pipes, away from the channels, the paths of order. He was freestyle, wild, open-ended and unordered. On these corners – these idle corners in Zimbabwe’s modern crisis – he organised, fought, read, taught. But most of all, as in all things in his life, he extolled and prophesied, the political prophecies of a rational man with an excess of love and hope. Each of these prophecies would have seemed, in another decade or age, like a simple demand for dignity for a normal people, for their elementary rights. Yet Biko had been cast into this role, into his constant, ceaseless ebullience, his never-ending hope, his optimism, by the demands and constraints of his time – of our time.

  *

  Some months before Rosa was conceived, Viktor and Nina booked their first romantic city break. The package included the train tickets and a two-star hotel for two nights.

  Halfway through a duty-bound visit to a museum, the freezing drizzle pelting their faces, standing in the queue with a crowd of tourists breathing into their hands and stamping blood back into their feet, Nina had a meltdown.

  ‘You’ve got to know this about me. I have got to learn this about myself. I don’t cope well with these kinds of trips. I need a toilet.’

  Viktor indicated a dedicated oblong concrete block twenty metres from the queue. ‘Do you have change?’ he asked. She swivelled on the balls of her feet and moved towards the toilet.

  When Nina returned, Viktor opened his arms to hold her. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t queue. I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m sorry. Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll go back to the hotel,’ Viktor said, pleased to leave the bitter winter.

  ‘I can’t do this. I need to know my limitations,’ she repeated. They started to walk away from the museum.

  ‘I think you are being hard on yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t speak to me. Don’t. I am already hating myself for doing this. You’re just making it worse.’

  Viktor sucked the cold air in deeply. His lungs hurt. ‘Listen, darling, it’s cold. You have your period. The toilets are filthy in Paris. I can’t think of anything better than lounging in the hotel room.’

  ‘Thanks, but can’t you see it’s too late for that?’

  Despite himself, Viktor muttered, ‘Just ignore them. Look as though you know where you’re heading.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where I’m heading.’

  ‘Just don’t give them any eye contact.’

  Paris looked threadbare against the hard gaze of commuters barging past them. Europe had changed; the carefree city break now involved a tortuous reminder of the continent’s decline. Nina’s neck was wrapped in a black scarf. Her glasses hung on a gold metal chain against her coat and together they elbowed through the waiting lines of hawkers pushing phonecards, tours, taxis and cigarettes in husky, accented English. Heated pavement grates blowing out hot air were turned into beds, doorways crowded w
ith cardboard and sleeping bags; a mother and two children sat on blankets in a telephone booth.

  ‘This is what their bloody austerity looks like,’ Viktor said, hauling the suitcase over the uneven kerb. ‘It’s hard to be here as a tourist.’ He snapped a photo with his phone surreptitiously, careful to keep the faces out of the frame, focusing on the whole.

  Viktor’s rage at the world was real but impotent. He had been the child politician, under the influence of his beloved Uncle Jack, reading the newspaper at the kitchen table as a boy – slamming Thatcher and Kinnock with equal wrath, trying to enunciate, to find the meaning, to explain and condemn.

  ‘Not if you’re positive, Vik.’ Nina believed that there was no edge in life which could not be smoothed by taking the right approach, so she unbuttoned her jacket, unravelled her scarf and pulled her jumper away from her skin, drawing the air over her body.

  ‘Positivity is not a remedy if you’re living in a telephone box.’

  ‘Maybe, but neither is despair. Your despair is only a performance when you are looking in from outside.’

  ‘Why do you have to personalise it?’ he said absently, staring at the map on his phone.

  ‘Let’s just try to enjoy ourselves, shall we?’ Nina replied. ‘We’re only here for two days.’

  They continued to walk together in silence, their suitcases tapping in unison against the pavement.

  Nina saw the Hotel Americain in the distance, the blue-lit sign running up the side of the hotel. Two stars blazed brightly over the doorway.

  ‘We’re here, sweetie,’ Nina reached for Viktor’s hand.

  ‘Hotel Two Stars,’ Viktor said. He noticed a man sitting by the door, protected with earmuffs and a fur collar drawn across his neck; he had telephone and lottery cards pinned along the length of both lapels. Viktor took a photo.

  ‘Jesus, Viktor,’ Nina snapped.